Family Bible

by Melissa J. Delbridge

Book Overview

"Swimming and sex seemed a lot alike to me when I was growing up. You took off most of your clothes to do them and you only did them with people who
were the same color as you. As your daddy got richer, you got to do them in fancier places." Starting with her father, who never met a whitetail buck he couldn't shoot, a whiskey bottle he couldn't empty, or a woman he couldn't charm, and her mother, who "invented road rage before 1960," Melissa Delbridge...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1587296519
• ISBN13: 9781587296512
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Length: 143 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Stunning

FAMILY BIBLE is the book that I'm always looking for and almost never find. It's enormously funny, and its wit is like a lightning strike, fueled by Melissa Delbridge's sharp eye and deep intelligence. She writes about families and history and our claims on one another with remarkable wisdom and tart, sharp humor. And she writes like an angel. An angel who likes jokes. I am not a southerner. A person doesn't need to be a southerner to love and appreciate this book. Melissa Delbridge demonstrates, from one taut, funny sentence to the next, how the world feels to a southerner of her particular time and place. She does much more than write for insiders; she lets the rest of the world in, a much greater accomplishment.

Memoir as Memoir Should Be--Truth, Humor, Insight

In FAMILY BIBLE, Melissa Delbridge raises the level for memoir. This collection of essays gives the reader a fly-on-the-wall view of one woman's life. The stories are told without rancor, with a natural subjectivity and fresh honesty. The titles of the essays entice the reader, eg, "Shot Rule," "Under My Saddle," and "Girls Turned In." Delbridge takes us through her early life (and leaves us longing to be brought fully up to the present) with biting humor and doesn't shy away from self-deprecation. At times I laughed aloud as I read, sometimes with Melissa and sometimes at her. I don't like for writers to be described as "southern," which brings up images of magnolias and cornpone, but Delbridge is the best of the breed...a writer who is from the south, of the south, proud of her heritage, and unafraid to look at it with intense scrutiny. Her stories are peopled by family members I long to know, especially her mother and her aunts, who cope as women do when men drink and run around on them. Readers beware: prepare yourselves for the unexpected from the extraordinary twists and turns these essays take. This book begins what I trust will be a long a fruitful career for Melissa Delbridge--I want more!

Striking in Its Candor

A young girl's unusally candid coming-of-age story set in West Alabama (Tuscaloosa County) in the early to mid-seventies. One must admire Melissa Delbridge for her candor and for her keen and thoughtful insight into those times and the people around her, adults and young folk her own age. Most of all for her ability, candor and willingness to "tell-it-like-it-was." Many writers might fictionalize their lives; Ms Delbridge "lets it all hang out," and the result is a book that mixes the humor and pathos of life in some very readable and provacative chapters. There are many themes and storylines in the book, just as there are many themes and storylines in the living of life, race, poverty, sex, abuse, opportunity or the lack of it, the first awareness of social standing or lack of it, parental and family relationships (good and bad), and beginnings of an awareness of who you "really are..." These are but a few of the sometimes movingly written chapters. The reader is left with the feeling that this is a memoir of woman who has come a long, long way. One wants to say, even shout, "You Go, Girl!!" Because of its candor and at times graphic discription, it is somewhat surprising that the book has been received as well as it has in Tuscalooa, setting for the story. Perhaps that, in an of itself, indicates a coming-of-age of the South, at least this part of the South--the ability, even desire, to see ourselves as we really were rather than as we want to see ourselves and want others to see us.

Undeniable, refreshing literary brilliance!

Fantastic read! Oftentimes, it seems as though Delbridge is in the room with you, telling her life story over gin and tonic. Her ability to capture southern rhetoric and feeling in writing is second to none. If you grew up in the south, the north, North America or anywhere else on the globe, there is something in this book that you can appreciate.

The Next County Over

Melissa Delbridge wrote this memoir of her childhood and early adult years in the Southern language which is to say that it is filled with those experiences and nuances that her compatriots will recognize with ease. If you are not Southern, or not otherwise sensitized, you may miss shadings, nuances, and meanings gloriously abundant. Having grown up in "the next county over" - our ancestors pioneered these places - the delicacies were a constant delight, or lesson. The author wrote intimately about her life before she became a literary lady, although beginnings are visible. One might call it true confessions, growing up in Alabama (or elsewhere) in the 1960s and 1970s, or revelations to guide us beyond our dysfunctional or "evil" families. There is all that, but there is far more for many of us. Women are its heroines and victims, but you could, some particularities aside, substitute men's names, the universality maintained. By chance, I read several early chapters, then all the others, saving the last for the next day. Afterward I realized that I had rather accidentally fallen upon three major parts. The early chapters were nostalgic, very Southern so familiar. It is "going to be a hoot," I thought. Continuing to read, I quickly realized that this story is a heavy. These anecdotes and stories, contrasted to the lilt of the author's words, are serious life, all happenings that others have managed or not. Her passage over the decades was stormy and bumpy, part self-inflicted and part sent by the gods, DNA, the age, or whatever. Sometimes the tales jump from one to the other without obvious sequitur, momentarily jogging the reader. However, Ms Delbridge writes as she speaks, and therein is much charm. She is right there on the porch talking to us, as many of us would likely do. The final chapter is a brilliant literary stroke, illuminating all that came before it. Here are the meanings of what we read and experienced in our memories and psyches. This capstone raises this book to a particularly high level of artistry.