I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots: A Novel [Paperback]

“Straight’s portrayal of a black woman’s life is nearly miraculous in its astonishing richness of detail, its emotional honesty and its breadth of human thought and feeling.” —USA Today

Evoking the Gullah–speaking 1950s community of Pine Gardens, South Carolina, I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots follows Marietta Cook, a maid with a growing interest in the civil rights movement, as she raises talented twin boys destined for pro football glory and comes to find peace in an often unjust world.

Imbued with extraordinary resilience and joy, Susan Straight’s debut is a celebration of an extraordinary soul and a novel with a beautifully vivid sense of place.Praise for I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

“Straight’s portrayal of a black woman’s life is nearly miraculous in its astonishing richness of detail, its emotional honesty and its breadth of human thought and feeling.” —USA Today

“Elegant . . . As monumental as the tall, taciturn woman whose life it traces.” —Publishers Weekly

“How long has it been since I stayed up until four in the morning to finish reading a book? The self–contained, compelling world presented here, accessible though so very strange, belongs to its unforgettable heroine.” —April Bernard, New York Newsday

Praise for In The Country of Women

“With stirring details and delving perceptions, Straight chronicles the repercussions, generation after generation, of enslavement, Jim CrolƒQ