WITH THE DEVIL'S HELP

Stand-up comic and writer Wooten turns in an earnest, sometimes sorrowful account of his upbringing in the poorest part of northeast Alabama.

“I always imagined that centuries after humans no longer inhabit Earth, the planet will become a huge ball of kudzu drifting through space,” writes Wooten, who grew up on a pig farm on a kudzu-choked rise called Sand Mountain. It had sand but also coal, enough to send a mining company to buy mineral rights—which, in the eyes of Wooten’s father, amounted to free money, and “what could be better?” The author’s father, he writes, was “an artist when it came to punishment,” for whom “mercurial” scarcely begins to cover the ground. When his wife chided him for driving too fast, “Daddy” threw a brand-new fishing chair that his children bought him for Father’s Day into the middle of a lake, and mom was soon nursing a black eye. The Wootens lived in a shack without insulation or siding, and they usually had no electricity “because the stingy people at the power company wanted a second payment.” Daddy’s uncertain mental condition and worrying visits by men in black suits lead young Wooten to explore the preceding generation, discovering that his grandfather had been imprisoned for murdering his own son-in-law, who admittedly cheated him on the proceeds of a potato harvest. Grandfather Wooten outsmarted the authorities, though, one day simply walking away from prison, never to be caught, “hiding in plain sight.” The author celebrates the mountain as “a veritable Candyland filled with natural sweet-tooth appeasements” such as tree trunks full of wild honey, but it’s a sad and depressing place for the most part, burdened with tragic history that, only in his 50s and too late to do anything about it, he decided was the product of unaddressed mental illness.

A Drive-By Truckers album of a book, sometimes appalling, always heartfelt and vividly observed.