Southern Discomfort

August 1, 2018
The Mississippi blues take on new meaning in this tragic yet uplifting memoir.With its Southern setting and themes of racial conflict and civil rights, it's easy to see how this book has been compared to The Help. But Clark's debut is an entirely original--and true--story. In the Grammy Award-winning songwriter and producer's memoir, she reveals a Southern gothic tale of growing up in 1950s Waynesboro, Mississippi, a lesbian raised by a womanizing father, an alcoholic mother, and a household of African-American help whom she'd sooner call family. Long before the author went on to become a renowned music producer, she was a little girl trying to make sense of her confusing world on the cusp of integration. The youngest daughter of four, Clark was the only one in the house by the time her parents had reached the height of their fisticuffs. The daughter of the wealthiest man in town, Clark watched her father's adultery in action. "On any given day," she writes, "Daddy would cruise around town, admiring his own image in his Cadillac's rearview mirror, his left arm dangling out the window, a cigarette between his fingers. When he wasn't entertaining some woman in his car, he and I would tool around town, making his daily rounds." His womanizing drove Clark's mother not only to drink, but to shoot, and the author saw her mother, on more than one occasion, take aim at her father. But this isn't merely a story of parental dysfunction. The narrative is an investigation of what it meant to be a progressive during the Jim Crow era. Clark openly mocked Klan members, took her black nanny to lunch days after the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and tested her own family's acceptance by marrying a woman. Yet throughout the book, the overarching theme is love.A highly satisfying look at a flawed family, a conflicted South, and a fraught future.

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Starred review from September 24, 2018
Clark paints a raw and deeply honest picture of her childhood in 1950s and ’60s Mississippi. Clark, who is white, writes movingly of her black maid and stand-in mother, Virgie, who was not allowed to eat in her kitchen or white restaurants; of her mother’s forced stay at a barbaric mental hospital, at the insistence of her father; of her father’s casual and continued cruelty toward her sister, Toni (he hit her when she was a child and insulted her weight gain as an adult); and, ultimately, of the forces that helped Clark to leave her hometown for the Univ. of Southern Mississippi to pursue a career in music and the short-lived relationship that resulted in her daughter, Cody. What Clark shows so beautifully is that the people she discusses, as unredeemable as they may at first seem, are much more complex: her father, never one to shy away from using racial epithets, secretly helped build the local black church; her alcoholic mother, trying to deal with her husband’s many affairs, eventually stood up to him; and Clark herself realized at the age of six that she was gay, but she still dressed up like a conventional Southern belle. Clark’s narrative draws the reader in to a wonderful story of the South going from old to new. Agent: Brettne Bloom, Book Group.

October 1, 2018
Clark's parents were the first divorced couple she knew in her Mississippi hometown. Even then, as a preteen in the 1960s, she knew her mother had her reasons for leaving: she had nearly killed Clark's father and herself over his constant philandering. Clark's child's-eye view of her parents and her complicated, very different relationships with each of them are her dramatic memoir's focus. Her father was a self-made man with business ties to the Klan, and her willful, statuesque mother dreamed of being a songwriter?a dream realized by Clark herself, now a Grammy-winning songwriter and producer. Undercurrents in her parents' near-constant drama are the abiding motherly love Clark received from her family's black maid, Virgie; her early realization that she was gay; and the tensions of a community wrestling with the fight for civil rights. Clark's observations of startling racial cruelty (and use of the n-word) as well as her own shame for unknowingly railing against that cruelty at the expense of the very people she wanted to uplift will provoke thought and discussion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)