A Place to Call Home Mass market paperbound - 1998

Excerpt

I planned to be the kind of old Southern lady who talks to her tomato plants and buys sweaters for her cats.  I'd just turned thirty, but I was already sizing up where I'd been and where I was headed.  So I knew that when I was old I'd be deliberately peculiar. I'd wear bright red lipstick and tell embarrassing true stories about my family, and people would say, "I heard she was always a little funny, if you know what I mean."

They wouldn't understand why, and I didn't intend to tell them.  I thought I'd sit in a rocking chair on the porch of some fake-antebellum nursing home for decrepit journalists, get drunk on bourbon and Coca-Cola, and cry over Roan Sullivan.  I was only ten the last time I saw him, and he was fifteen, and twenty years had passed since then, but I'd never forgotten him and knew I never would.

"I'd like to believe life turned out well for Roanie," Mama said periodically, and Daddy nodded without meeting her eyes, and they dropped the subject.  They felt guilty about the part they'd played in driving Roan away, and they knew I couldn't forgive them for it.  He was one of the disappointments between them and me, which was saying a lot, since I'd felt like such a helpless failure when they brought me home from the hospital last spring.

My two oldest brothers, Josh and Brady, didn't speak about Roan at all.  They were away at college during most of the Roan Sullivan era in our family.  But my two other brothers remembered him each time they came back from a hunting trip with a prize buck.  "It can't hold a candle to the one Roan Sullivan shot when we were kids," Evan always said to Hop.  "Nope," Hop agreed with a mournful sigh.  "That buck was a king." Evan and Hop measured regret in terms of antlers.

As for the rest of the family--Daddy's side, Mama's side, merged halves of a family tree so large and complex and deeply rooted it looked like an overgrown oak to strangers--Roan Sullivan was only a fading reflection in the mirror of their biases and regrets and sympathies.  How they remembered him depended on how they saw themselves and our world back then, and most of them had turned the painful memory to the wall.

But he and I were a permanent fixture in local history, as vivid and tragic as anything could be in a small Georgia community isolated in the lap of the mountains, where people hoard sad stories as carefully as their great-grandmothers' china.  My great-grandmother's glassware and china service, by the way, were packed in a crate in Mama and Daddy's attic.  Mama had this wistful little hope that I'd use it someday, that her only girl among five children would magically and belatedly blossom into the kind of woman who set a table with china instead of plastic.

There was hope for that.  But what happened to Roan Sullivan and me changed my life and changed my family.  Because of him we saw ourselves as we were, made of the kindness and cruelty that bond people together by blood, marriage, and time.  I tried to save him and he ended up saving me.  He might have been dead for twenty years--I didn't know then--but I knew I'd come full circle because of him: I would always wait for him to come back, too.

The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been.

Media reviews

"Rarely will a book touch your heart like A Place to Call Home. So sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy."
--The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

"A beautiful, believable love story."
--The Chicago Tribune

"Stylishly written, filled with Southern ease and humor." --Tampa Tribune