My Appalachia: A Memoir (review)

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Reviewed by: My Appalachia: A Memoir Mary Owens (bio) Sidney Saylor Farr . My Appalachia: A Memoir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. 272 pages. Hardback with dust jacket, $35.00. Sidney Saylor Farr's new memoir, My Appalachia, is a gift to any woman looking for the path out of oppression and into a self-confident life, but especially so for Appalachian women. Her depiction of life at Stoney Fork, in southeastern Kentucky, will draw those who grew up in the region back to their mountain roots. As a former editor of Appalachian Heritage (1985 through 1999) and the author of seven books, Ms. Farr has a solid reputation in Appalachian literature. Her memoir takes us to the hidden places of a woman's heart as she grows from an insecure mountain girl to a spiritually and emotionally secure woman. We understand young Sidney's life through the family stories that draw us into the book. On her family's secluded farm in Bell County ("as far back in the 'hollers' as it was possible to go"), jokes, riddles, and wild tales of relatives and haints are shared as frequently as country ham and biscuits. She hears them on the porch after supper, or around the fire at family picnics with potatoes frying in an iron skillet, or in a rowboat while fishing with her father and grandmother. As the eldest child she works gladly alongside her father, clearing new ground to plant corn, or on the other end of a cross cut saw; as the eldest grandchild she's an eager audience for her great-grandmother's scandalous stories. She draws her strength from these people, the food, and the ever-present force of the natural world around her. Her ambition to learn, and her desire to write, grow against this backdrop; but when she is eleven her mother's illness forces her to quit school and help raise nine younger children. She marries at fifteen to escape that life. Her memoir draws us into the terrible isolation she experienced—not from growing up in a remote part of Appalachia—but from the struggle to find her voice, express her creativity, and reach her academic goals. Living with an abusive husband not capable of loving her, she dreams every night of going back to school, learning to play music, and to write. Ms. Farr exposes her existential ache, [End Page 97] and honestly verbalizes her struggle to know herself. After winning freedom from her first husband, her second husband, for whom she feels life-changing passion, leaves her. Devastated, she writes in her journal: "This journey may bring death to many parts of the person that I am. I may have to be pulled, screaming, out of my shell. There may have to be fire and smoke and pain. It hurts to part with the illusions, the old security of acting like a chameleon, taking on the virtues or the vices attributed to me by others." Her story takes detours through her memories of the mountains, and conversations with relatives long gone; she pauses to give advice and pass on wisdom like a good friend over the kitchen table. And when we're ready to pick up more details of her married life, she goes on. She tells of getting her high school diploma via correspondence (despite her husband's objections), and getting her degree from Berea College one class at a time. It's with tremendous relief that we read how through counseling she finds the courage to face down her first husband, to risk a hit to the face or another ego-crushing insult. She survives being unloved in her first marriage, and being deserted in her second, and emerges intact. Her story highlights the walls oppressive relationships can build around our self confidence; it reveals how one woman broke free and followed a path into the light. Spiritual light is unmistakable in Ms. Farr's life, and shines through her memoir. She recounts meeting Tom Sawyer and discusses the two books she wrote detailing his dramatic near-death experience and later life (What Tom Sawyer Learned From Dying, 1993; and Tom Sawyer And The Spiritual Whirlwind...