Meander Belt
Family, Loss, and Coming of Age in the Working-Class South
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Nebraska Press
Published:1st Oct '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In Meander Belt M. Randal O’Wain offers a reflection on how a working-class boy from Memphis, Tennessee, came to fall in love with language, reading, writing, and the larger world outside of the American South. This memoir examines what it means for the son of a carpenter to value mental rather than physical labor and what this does to his relationship with his family, whose livelihood and sensibility are decidedly blue collar. Straining the father-son bond further, O’Wain leaves home to find a life outside Memphis, roaming from place to place, finding odd jobs, and touring with his band. From memory and observation, O’Wain assembles a subtle and spare portrait of his roots, family, and ultimately discovers that his working-class upbringing is not so antithetical to the man he has become.
“A tour de force of white working-class identity married to a writer’s imaginative hunger for words. What makes this book remarkable is the narrator’s steely tension between his innate desire for unknown worlds and the pullback to the roughed up Wild West of Memphis, where a hardworking but wounded father has planted the seeds of loyalty.”—Patricia Foster, author of All the Lost Girls and Girl from Soldier Creek
“Randal O’Wain’s memoir Meander Belt is more than the heart-wrenching story of a working-class southern family in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. In and through the struggles he and his family experience, O’Wain reveals the insidious effects of class and status on the most intimate aspects of American life. Meander Belt combines riveting storytelling with implicit emotional, psychosocial analysis; the result is the rarest of all books—a deeply thoughtful page-turner.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Reel to Reel and Night of the Republic
“For all their poignant intimacy, the essays in Meander Belt are somehow also achingly universal, a self-portrait made up of wisdom and vulnerability that tells the story of a family, a place, and a culture.”—John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain
ISBN: 9781496213310
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
216 pages