THE PULPWOOD QUEENS' TIARA WEARING, BOOK SHARING, GUIDE TO LIFE

THE PULPWOOD QUEENS' TIARA WEARING, BOOK SHARING, GUIDE TO LIFE celebrates female friendship, sisterhood, and the transformative power of reading. It includes life principles and motivational anecdotes, hilarious and heart-warming stories of friendships among the Queens, and stories from Kathy about the books that have inspired her throughout her life, complete with personalized suggested book lists.

TIARA WEARING, BOOK SHARING, GUIDE TO LIFE

CHAPTER 3

There’s No Place Like Home

“The Road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick.” —L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The following books led me to discover that there really is “no place like home,” even if home wasn’t exactly like Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver, the television shows of my youth. These are books that helped me to understand my family a little better.

Family by J. California Cooper

Set in the South before the Civil War, the voice is of slave Clora, who is the granddaughter of a slave and whose mother was a slave who killed herself. Clora tries to kill her children, then succeeds in killing herself. The story unfolds as Clora narrates as a spirit watching from above.

Body of Knowledge by Carol Dawson Victoria Grace

Ransom weighs over 500 pounds and lives in her family’s ancestral home in West Texas, where a silent feud has been battling among her family members for decades. She passes the time being told family stories by the maid. This book has one of the most surprising endings I have ever read.

Mad Girls in Love by Michael Lee West

A young bride and mother gets in a fight with her husband and hits him in the head with a frozen rack of ribs as he tries to drown her in the sink. Thinking that she has accidentally killed her husband, she flees, only to find out she may have left him for dead but he lives—and with revenge. He divorces her and takes full custody of their little girl. The young mother is devastated and all the while her own mother is in a mental institution and writes letters to Pat Nixon in the hopes of getting her grandchild back for her daughter. And that is only the beginning!

Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

I love this book because it is about a son who just wants to learn the truth from his father, the storyteller. His father has told fanciful tales throughout his life, and now he is dying. Get a box of tissues—I cried like a baby over the ending.

Comfort Creek by Joyce McDonald

Mama has run off to become a country singer, Daddy has lost his job, and eleven-year-old Quinn and her sisters are living in a swamp without water and electricity. Need I say more?

The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer

This is the memoir of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who essentially grew up in the neighborhood bar. Living in a rundown house overrun by cousins, with a father he can only hear by listening to him on the radio, J.R. escaped to the Irish Catholic bar looking for a father figure. The bar was his saving grace and also his downfall.

Miss American Pie by Margaret Sartor

This book is made up of the actual diaries of Margaret from the time she was in the seventh grade to her graduation from high school. What makes this such a compelling read is that she truly captured my time growing up in the 1970s. Too bad I burned my diaries in the trash barrel after I caught my mother reading them. Luckily, we have Margaret’s!