Buryin' Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest
Nominated by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for their award in nonfiction for 2011!!
Chosen by DELTA MAGAZINE as one of the TOP FIVE reads of 2011!!
A descendant of Lebanese Catholic immigrants on her father’s side and of Baptist sharecroppers on her mother’s, Teresa Nicholas recounts a Southern upbringing with an unusual inflection. Beginning in the late 1950s, the memoir depicts her charmed early childhood, when she and her family live with her grandparents in a graceful old bungalow in Yazoo City, Mississippi. But when the author is five, her eccentric father, secretive, penurious, and hoarding, moves his growing family into a condemned duplex nearby. Separated from her beloved grandmother and chafing under her father’s erratic discipline, the girl longs to flee from the awful house. Later, when she’s a teenager, she and her father find themselves on conflicting sides of the civil rights movement, and their arguments grow more painful. She finally leaves Mississippi when a scholarship to Swarthmore College provides her escape.
Two decades later Nicholas has built a successful career in book publishing in New York. But when her father suddenly dies she returns for the funeral and spends a month in the hated duplex, ostensibly to help her mother adjust. As she learns more about her father, she comes to understand that he wasn’t just the angry tyrant she thought she knew. And as she draws closer to her country-talking, stroke-affected mother, she sees that her mother is also far from the naïve, helpless creature she recalled. Through a series of surprising, poignant, and humorous discoveries, the author and her mother uncover her father’s secrets, in all their complicated humanity. Her mother ultimately shows her how to forgive her father and come home again.
Graced with a palpable sense of time and place and peopled by memorable characters, this funny, moving memoir explores the intermingling of shame and love that may lie at the heart of family life.
Two decades later Nicholas has built a successful career in book publishing in New York. But when her father suddenly dies she returns for the funeral and spends a month in the hated duplex, ostensibly to help her mother adjust. As she learns more about her father, she comes to understand that he wasn’t just the angry tyrant she thought she knew. And as she draws closer to her country-talking, stroke-affected mother, she sees that her mother is also far from the naïve, helpless creature she recalled. Through a series of surprising, poignant, and humorous discoveries, the author and her mother uncover her father’s secrets, in all their complicated humanity. Her mother ultimately shows her how to forgive her father and come home again.
Graced with a palpable sense of time and place and peopled by memorable characters, this funny, moving memoir explores the intermingling of shame and love that may lie at the heart of family life.
