A touching epistolary memoir exploring family, identity, and the South.West Coast-based Aunt K writes to her niece DeeDee, sharing family history and anecdotes about their North Carolina relatives. The letters evolve into broader discussions of community, loss, love, ambition, leaving the South, and what it means to negotiate life as a female.Integral to the correspondence are books and writers, landscapes and cityscapes. This memoir explores the inter-weavings of person and place, and the elements that conspire to make us who we are. If you enjoy reflective essays, Southern literature, and stories of family and identity, this memoir is for you. Discover a world of memory, connection, and the enduring power of place.
"If you know Kat Meads’s work, you’ll recognize the author in these pages. If you don’t know her, you’re in for a treat. Taking the form of letters to her niece in 1996,Dear DeeDeeconsists of vignettes, which, when quilted together, describe an entire life. A cynical romantic, a clear-eyed myopic, and an honest fibber, Meads emerges in these pages not so much as a memoirist but as a chronicler of a time, place, family and way of life which is no more. The details of her Southern upbringing are precise, the humor acerbic, and the abiding love she has for her family, particularly for her beloved brother, affecting. You’ll finish this evocative book wishing you had an aunt like Woolf-worshipping, keenly-aware, word-braiding Meads." —Allison Amend, author ofEnchanted IslandsandA Nearly Perfect Copy
"My first encounter with the writing of Kat Meads was her spellbinding genre-blurring storyIn the Guise of an Explanation of My Aunt’s Life, a three-decades-ago precursor to this beguiling take on "Southern memoir". Always defiant of definition, Meads has mapped a unique family and a special region withlSŤ
![Dear DeeDee [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/6/1/1/2_4435214.jpg "Dear DeeDee [Paperback]")