Chapter 16 - Part 460

Hit City

In a new memoir, Loretta Lynn recalls her own life through the lyrics of her songs

By Charlotte Pence | May 9, 2012

May 9, 2012 Loretta Lynn’s rise to fame epitomizes the quintessential American dream, but with a uniquely Appalachian slant. A coal miner’s daughter who was, as her number-one hit explains, “born in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Hollow,” Lynn married at thirteen and had four children by eighteen. Despite this far-from-glamorous beginning, she has recorded sixteen number-one hits and sent seventy songs up the country charts. And at age seventy-seven, she continues to write and record crafted, heartfelt songs. It’s only fitting that Loretta Lynn’s newest memoir tells the story of her life through the medium that made her famous: her songs. In Honky Tonk Girl: My Life in Lyrics, Lynn collects 300 of her lyrics, glossing many of them with anecdotes that explain their genesis. Loretta Lynn will appear at the Ryman Auditorium on May 10 at as part of Opry Country Classics.

The Agricultural Agent’s Daughter

In a new memoir, Sissy Spacek idealizes her small-town, Southern roots and love of simple pleasures

By Liz Garrigan | May 8, 2012

May 8, 2012 Sissy Spacek may be a Hollywood legend—she’s best known for her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Loretta Lynn in the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter—but her stories are refreshingly devoid of unwanted pregnancies, drug and alcohol addiction, marital abuse, family dysfunction, or devastating divorce. Spacek’s new memoir contains no shocking bombshells, no reprisals, not even the faintest hint of relationship retaliation. The book is quite simply the account of a charmed and happy life, of family love and loyalty, of cherished children and pets, of gardens watered in pajamas. On May 13, as part of the Salon@615 series, Spacek will discuss My Extraordinary Ordinary Life at the Nashville Public Library at 3 p.m.

How Much Pain Should One Person Endure?

Nashvillian J.T. Ellison begins a new suspense series

By Faye Jones | May 7, 2012

May 7, 2012 Nashville medical examiner Samantha Owens lost her husband and children in the 2010 flood. Since then, she has managed to survive by keeping her world small and by containing her grief in a series of compulsive behaviors. But that control is shattered when she’s asked to come to Washington DC to do a second autopsy on the body of a former boyfriend. So begins A Deeper Darkness, the first book in a new suspense series by J.T. Ellison, author of the popular Taylor Jackson mysteries. J.T. Ellison will discuss A Deeper Darkness on May 12 at Mysteries & More in Nashville at 2 p.m.

Double-Dealing

YA novelist Victoria Schwab has two more books on the way—and one of them is for grownups

By Margaret Renkl | May 7, 2012

May 7, 2012 Nashville YA author Victoria Schwab is a 24-year-old wunderkind who wrote her first novel, The Near Witch, while she was still in college and signed with an agent before she was old enough to buy beer. Even before the book was released last year, Schwab had become a leader in the literary community, rallying writers (and agents and editors) across the country to help in a unique fundraising effort to benefit the victims of Tennessee’s 2010 floods. When The Near Witch finally appeared last August, it was to great acclaim: Chapter 16‘s Susannah Felts called it “an accomplished take on the [fairy-tale] form, artfully deploying many of its traditional elements: a seemingly distant time and place, a dark forest, children, a young person on a quest, and, of course, witches.”

First-Person Point of View

Amy Greene and Ann Patchett may be novelists, but they have opinions, too

By Margaret Renkl | May 4, 2012

May 4, 2012 Tennessee’s legislative agenda this year has earned the state unwelcome notice in a national media that too often seems downright eager for any chance to portray Southerners as stupid, lazy, and mean. Late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have had particular fun this legislative season with new Tennessee laws governing what may or may not be taught—or even said—by the state’s schoolteachers. So it was an especially welcome surprise to open last Sunday’s edition of The New York Time and find a smart, reasoned, historically nuanced response to the current political climate by an actual Tennessean: novelist Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot.

Native Tracks

Red Weather, Janet McAdams’s elegiac novel, follows a woman’s search for her missing parents

By Sarah Norris | May 3, 2012

May 3, 2012 Red Weather, the debut novel by poet Janet McAdams, tracks the story of Neva, a young mixed-race woman who’s searching for her parents. Lyrical and vivid, the mystery unfolds in Central America, in the capital of the small, fictional Coatepeque. There, mounting violence against the country’s indigenous people provides a menacing backdrop to Neva’s crisis of identity, mirroring her lifelong sense of uncertain belonging. Janet McAdams will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 13 at 2 p.m.