South Toward Home

April 2, 2018
Reed’s collection of snappy columns from the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun makes for an inviting way to ease into summer reading, even for those who have never ventured below the Mason-Dixon line. She describes growing up in a rarified South, one that included impressive guests at family parties—William F. Buckley, for one—and debutante balls, but her writing transcends socioeconomic boundaries as easily as geographic ones. A top-notch storyteller, Reed relates early memories ranging from a case of adolescent heartbreak that resulted in her triumphant discovery of “the healing power of glamour,” to the complete neglect of her beloved first car. A Southern book would be incomplete without a discussion of food, and Reed does not disappoint, with nods to fried chicken, Kool-Aid pickles (aka the Koolickle), various pig parts, and the Delta tamale. Most memorable, perhaps, are Reed’s stories about entertaining, from “insanely over the top” boat rides on the Mississippi
to a raucous Thanksgiving celebration pairing turkey with mint juleps. Reed is hilarious and charmingly irreverent, and her ability to capture an element of Southern life in a phrase (“God, Gators and Gumbo” for Louisiana) or to describe, in a short sentence or two, a funny, sweet memory of 40 years ago, are the marks of a true talent.

April 15, 2018
A Mississippi native returns to the South to revel in the "typically jarring contradictions" of Dixie.Garden & Gun contributing editor Reed (Julia Reed's South: Spirited Entertaining and High-Style Fun All Year Long, 2016, etc.) logged time in newsrooms up North, but she found it necessary, in time, to get herself back home. Even though "it's hot as hell, the mosquitoes are murderous, and we all might be half crazy," there's something about the region that can't be bottled up and carried away. In this scattering of essays, the author hits on some of the high points and plenty of the low, perhaps the lowest being the whole Honey Boo Boo thing, which a friend of hers characterized with rough poetic justice as "Peckerwood Mayhem." For her part, Reed wryly notes the oddity of the fact that the show appeared on a network once called The Learning Channel. The author demonstrates an indexical bent, enumerating the things that make the South what it is: the highest incidence of diabetes, a still-high number of cigarette smokers, "the most violent crime, the most guns, and the most shooting deaths." In all this, she paints with a surprisingly broad brush given that the South is really a concatenation of Souths: Virginia is not Alabama is not Texas, despite some shared rounded vowels. Reed makes for a knowing commentator on debutante balls, pecan pies, and the relative merits of Scotch versus bourbon. Still, the collection sometimes hangs together too loosely, as if an excuse to pull together Reed's columns from her magazine. There's nothing terrible in it, but the disquisitions on such things as whether women should carry flasks ("they are also crucial to have on hand in times of stress, duress, or just plain boredom) and a playlist of Southern tunes (featuring, natch, "Sweet Home Alabama") seem to be mostly filler.A mixed bag but useful for explaining the South to Yankees--and perhaps to some Southerners, too.

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