Rick Bragg drawled into a cellphone as he drove down a familiar road.

"I'm halfway between someplace in Mississippi and another place in Mississippi," he said in a way that, coming from Bragg, sounded as specific as Google Earth.

A former Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent for The New York Times, Bragg has become a best-selling voice of the colorfully down-and-out South, as related through his own family.

His first memoir, "All Over but the Shoutin'," paid tribute to his mother, who raised three sons in Alabama's Appalachian foothills after Bragg's alcoholic father took off. His second chronicle, "Ava's Man," centered on the moonshining maternal grandfather who died before Bragg was born.

His latest family narrative, "The Prince of Frogtown" (Knopf, $24), explores the dark world of his father, who left when Bragg was 6 and died in 1975 — a man Bragg had largely dismissed earlier, he writes, as "a one-dimensional villain."

Bragg, 48, revisited his father after marrying a woman with a 10-year-old son. "With the weight of that new boy tugging at my clothes," he explains in "Frogtown," "I went to find him."

Bragg, who teaches writing at the University of Alabama, reads from his new book Tuesday night at the Jimmy Carter Library.

He talked with the AJC until his phone went dead while driving down Highway 49. He finished up later while on his book tour from a hotel in San Francisco.

Q: You seemed to write your father off for good in "All Over but the Shoutin'."

A: I thought I'd done a pretty good job of setting him aside. Then I inherited a 10-year-old boy and started thinking more and more about my dad. Maybe I just got old and worried — worried about dying and not ever saying anything good about him.

So I went looking for people to tell me something good. That's how I posed it: Tell me something good about my daddy. Sometimes they poured out, and sometimes they eked out.

Q: Did you have to convince people to talk?

A: I got the kind of people you can't convince. You have to hope they change their own mind. My brother Sam never did. His answer was, "He never did pay no light bills." My mom, it took forever. I'd almost given up before she finally told me the story about how he proposed.

Q: What did it mean to you?

A: It doesn't fix everything, but it beats the hell out of not knowing. I hope I live a long time, and in what time there is, when I think about my dad, it's going to be better now than it was.

Q: You forgive him?

A: (Pause) I don't know.

Q: Love him?

A: I don't know. That's hard to say without running off the road. I want to. I wish I could tie it up tight. It's more complicated than that.

Q: Hate him?

A: I hate what he allowed to happen. And I did hate him for a long time. Yeah, sometimes I do, I gotta be honest. But I understand more about what happened.

I wish it were easier. Truth is, this is hard to do. One of the ways I know it was good and worth doing is I'm so goddamn glad it's over.

Q: How was writing this book different from the others?

A: The first one I got to hide behind my mom, the same way I hid behind her when I was a little kid. The one on my grandfather was about the most fun I ever had. I didn't know who he was and to find him one great story at a time was almost folkloric. This one you do because there just ain't anything else in the world you can do but this. I needed to close that circle on my family.

Q: Tolstoy said happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Is that the gift to the memoirist?

A: The great gift to me was that these people were interesting. Over and over, somebody will walk up and say to me they recognize these people. That's the secret to the appeal. It's more class than region. Region just gives it its flavor.

Everyone would love an ideal, sitcom family. But, by God, there's just not too many of them out there. Poverty and drinking, and sometimes just selfishness, get in the way of what people would love to have.

Q: What's next?

A: I have a contract to write a novel. I'm supposed to give them an idea of what it's about, but [expletive], I don't have any idea.

I did write the first line: "The carnival owner really liked midgets, because they were always getting drunk on a thimbleful of bootleg whiskey, and falling off their Shetland ponies."