Nancy Culpepper

By Bobbie Ann Mason

Book Overview

Kentucky native Nancy Culpepper boldly left home to attend school in Massachusetts, married a Yankee, and raised her son in the Northeast. "One day I was feeding chickens and listening to Hank Williams and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what," she tells her husband, Jack. Yet no matter where she travels, her rural southern heritage is never far from her thoughts, her habits, and her heart.

Nancy is on a lifelong quest to understand her place in the world. Returning home to the family farm, she searches for photographic evidence of an ancestor bearing her own name. Still in her jeans, she brings home strange ideas and an assertiveness she learned up north.
Always adventurous, Nancy travels far and wide-searching, seeking. The narrative sweep of her life traverses the turbulent sixties, the Vietnam War, the eighties and the foreboding death of John Lennon, and finally the new millennium-when a self-assured Nancy finally emerges. These humorous and often touching stories recount her courtship and marriage to Jack, her relationship with her precocious son, and the deep, loving bond between her parents, Spence and Lila Culpepper. Eventually Nancy's marriage is threatened by a cultural divide that plagued her and Jack from the start. But when she inherits the Culpepper family farm and discovers more pieces of her ancestral puzzle, she realizes that her life is assuming its proper shape. Later, standing on a lonely mountain in England, she sees the world from a surprising perspective.

Bestselling author Bobbie Ann Mason's prizewinning Nancy Culpepper chronicles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Southern Review, and other distinguished literary anthologies. She has compiled these stories into one definitive collection, which includes the novella Spence + Lila, two new, never-before-published stories, and one Pushcart Prize winner. Heartfelt and thought-provoking, Nancy Culpepper is a poignant depiction of change and growth in a modern-day heroine.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812976673
• ISBN13: 9780812976670
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Random House Trade
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Love, Family, Acceptance, Perseverance

This weekend, I read and finished two beautiful books, both fiction: Nancy Culpepper, by Bobby Ann Mason, and Forgetfulness, by Ward Just, both published in 2006. Nancy Culpepper is a set of short stories about the protagonist, augmented by a novella about her parents, Spence + Lila (first published in the 80s --I loved when it first came out). Nancy is from Kentucky. Her parents, Spence and Lila, are hard-scrabble farmers who eventually do better with a small dairy farm. Until her grandmother dies --the first forty-one years of their married life-- Spence and Lila live with or close to her grandmother, never traveling. Nancy married an easterner, a photographer named Jack. They live in Cambridge MA and later somewhere rural in Pennsylvania. Later, when they separate, they move around. The book is about Nancy's dance: between her country roots and her love of her parents on the one side and her eastern education (Radcliffe, I think --I don't want to hunt it up right now), tastes and manners. The first three short stories, written in the 80s and early 90s, are wonderful. Spence + Lila is a gem --it narrates Lila's stay in the hospital for a mastectomy and an operation on one of her carotid arteries, but it's really about love, family, acceptance and spunk. It reminds you of feelings within your own family that you have but seldom or never articulate. It also reminds you that love doesn't have to be articulate to be felt. The final short stories --there are two or three-- are good but not as good as the first ones. But it doesn't make a difference. Mason's stories capture an engaging personality striving to make sense and gain pleasure from a life that has its share of stresses and disconnects but is ultimately self-affirming. Mason's view of life is intensely local and real, but ultimately benevolent. She writes about *connection. It's a lovely book. (I reviewed Mason's Feather Crowns for Library Journal when it came out and loved it. Her collection of short stories, Shiloh, is superb. Her novel, In Country, evoked the best performance Bruce Willis ever gave when it was translated --fairly faithfully-- into a movie.) David Keymer Modesto, CA