Books
Let’s go ahead and acknowledge the obvious: Nancy French’s A Red State of Mind: How a Catfish Queen Reject Became a Liberty Belle is in no way aiming for subtlety in the category of What Should I Title My First Book? These days, when what passes for political discourse is something akin to name calling on the playground, adding “red state” to the title of your debut memoir is a risk if you’re looking for a wide readership. French grew up in Paris, Tenn., and moved to Nashville for college. Barely 21, she married her husband after less than six weeks of dating; three months after that they picked up and moved to Manhattan. Over the next few years they continued to uproot, moving to Philadelphia, Ithaca and their current residence, Columbia, Tenn. She calls A Red State of Mind “one red American’s story about what it’s like to live in the blue states, when all she’d ever known was biscuits and church three times a week.”
With A Red State of Mind, French adheres to the traditional memoir format with stories of her childhood in the South, her marriage and her two children, but she also uses her experiences as an opportunity to comment on everything from Southern accents to Jesus to the actual I.Q. of the current president of the U.S. And since things seem to happen to French—fans of rock star David Lee Roth dial her Manhattan apartment at all hours, she’s forced to buy black market pacifiers and she accidentally becomes youth group leader to every teenage malcontent living in Georgetown, Ky.—she has plenty of opportunities to ask what it means to live in today’s world.
French also learns just how relative terms like liberal and conservative can be. While attending David Lipscomb University, French bristled at the rule banning female students from leading the school’s daily chapel service. She raised the issue during her Bible class, asking her professor, “What about a penis uniquely qualifies a man to lead chapel?” and thus became the “resident liberal at Lipscomb.” In the eyes of the administration and other students, she was “practically Gloria Steinem.”
What French, a former columnist for the Philadelphia City Paper, is really addressing with A Red State of Mind is the cultural—or even class—divisions that exist within America today: Yankee vs. Southerner, small town vs. big city, the upper crust vs. everyone else. As she puts it herself, she spent so many years living between two worlds that she “developed a deep appreciation for and frustration with both areas, which was as awkward as being friends with a couple after a divorce.”
Friendships tend to suffer from the strain of differing belief systems, but some of French’s actually thrive. Take her close friend Rene, who’s Jewish and agnostic. French calls their conversations “about as dull as a drawer of Ginsu knives, cutting away predispositions in the most humorous and sometimes painful ways possible.” But their differences are why “we spend hours talking on the phone, why we’re constantly surprised at each other, and why I cherish her friendship.” It’s a good thing, too, for when the very non-culinary French joins a monthly supper club, it’s Rene who commands Operation Gourmet Ruse. She talks her friend through simple guacamole appetizers and traditional Jewish dishes, and on the night French hosts the group in her home, stays close by and pretends to be the family housekeeper. Their friendship grew, French says, “one dish at a time over the course of the gourmet racket.”
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A Red State of Mind: How a Catfish Queen Reject Became a Liberty Belle, By Nancy French (Center Street, 252 pp., $23.99)
The book’s strengths are its humor and conversational tone, segueing from one point to another with familiar ease. Cultural collisions have always provided fodder for writers, but the book’s main weakness is that the red state/blue state joke gets tiresome. Even one God-fearing (or at least non-lunatic) Yankee Democrat would have kept the book from sounding at times like a sales pitch for the GOP. French is just too good a writer for gimmicks. She’s funny, she knows how to tell a story, and there’s often a poignancy to her writing. And when she holds up her own assumptions, cynicisms and prejudices for examination, A Red State of Mind is at its very best.