APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN GIRL

An affecting and well-written, if uneven, memoir of life in the holler. Warren locates her earliest memories in Depression-era Kentucky, where her father worked the coal mines and her mother struggled to raise 13 children. Warren evokes that world with a keen sense of detail: “Thick clouds of coal dust blown from [the] blasting inferno hung in the air picked up an air current and floated off to settle on every leaf of every tree and bush it could reach,” she writes of the setting. She is not always successful when she relates the details of her own life, for Warren seems strangely reluctant to place herself at center stage, and the distance is sometimes unsettling. When her gaze is elsewhere than on herself, however, Warren writes confidently and interestingly, telling tales of itinerant, guitar-strumming evangelists, scruffy dogs and their scruffy owners, and oddball neighbors. (One, a midwife, was held to be trustworthy because she could read and write, even though, Warren notes, “Father knew a man who carried spectacles around in his shirt pocket without knowing one word from another.”) Eventually driven from the Kentucky backwoods by poverty and encroaching mining and big-timber interests, her family relocated to Wyoming, where, Warren writes, people talked loudly (because, her mother explains, the wind blows all the time and they have to make themselves heard above it) and asked them rude questions about their background. Warren relates that she then endured years of shame about her hillbilly past before, married to a New Yorker, she decided to return home and embrace her past. The close of her memoir, however, is a particularly telling example of the adage that you can’t go home again. Readers of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands will find much of value in Warren’s life story.