"Swimming
and sex seemed a lot alike to me when I was growing up. You took off
most of your clothes to do them and you only did them with people who
were the same color as you. As your daddy got richer, you got to do
them in fancier places."
Starting with her father, who never met a whitetail buck he couldn't
shoot, a whiskey bottle he couldn't empty or a woman he couldn't charm,
and her mother, who "invented road rage before 1960,"
Melissa Delbridge introduces us to the people in her own family bible.
Readers will find elements of Southern Gothic and familiar vernacular
characters, but Delbridge endows each with her startling and original
interpretation. In this disarmingly unguarded and unapologetic memoir,
she shows us what really happened in the "stew of religion and sex" that was 1960s Tuscaloosa.
Whether telling of her father's circumspect "hunting trips,"
her mother's sudden, tempestuous moves across town in the middle of the
night, or coming to terms with her own sexuality on the banks of the
river, Delbridge is the real star of this entertaining memoir.
Crackling with wit, frighteningly smart, both drop-dead funny and
wrenchingly sad, Family Bible is a stunning personal history.
If you could not attend the reading but would like to purchase a signed copy of Family Bible, you can do so with this shopping cart.