NONFICTION
‘Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir’
Frances Mayes
Crown. $26. 336 pages.
It’s no secret that Frances Mayes, best known for her memoirs about Tuscany, was born and raised in the one-mile-square town of tiny Fitzgerald, in south Georgia. Glimpses of her honeyed, long-ago childhood are scattered throughout “Under the Tuscan Sun,” “Bella Tuscany” and “Every Day in Tuscany,” in the form of frequent comparisons between Italy and the American South.
There are the Sicilian tarts that evoke her grandmother’s lemon pie, garnished with Georgia pecans. The still-green Tuscan walnuts, their juice once used by the family maid to treat poison ivy. The scent of jasmine in Palermo that takes her “straight to a white Georgia road in moonlight” and her first kiss. The “storytelling, the fatalism, the visiting.”
Only once does the Peach State native hint that her past was anything other than idyllic: After college, she took “the first thing smoking on the runway out of Georgia” and never looked back.
The truth, revealed in Mayes’ long-awaited memoir, “Under Magnolia,” turns out to be about as gothic as anything Faulkner could have dreamed up, populated by characters straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story.
“I left the South a million years ago,” Mayes writes of her former hometown. “For years when I went back home to visit, I broke out in hives.” No wonder. Her parents, apparently cut from the same cloth as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, drank to excess and fought like hyenas. They neglected Frances, their youngest child, who came along well after their parenting skills had expired.
“Powerful, slapdash, weary of children,” her mother (Frankye) and father (Garbert) mustered plenty of energy to obsess over each other. “Every night was chaos. They shout and slam doors, roaring off in the car in the middle of the night.” Frances, who hid from their fights in closets and cabinets, was well loved but so peripheral that when she once ran away at 6 years old and spent the night in a culvert, no one noticed she was missing.
Despite it all, Mayes says, she was happy. She was a rowdy tomboy who loved to read — “my specialty is orphans on islands where houses have trapdoors into secret passageways that lead to the sea… no parents in the story” — and a class cut-up with plenty of friends. During her parents’ worst moods, she took refuge with the family’s maid, Willie May, who advised her to “just run out and play, try not to pay them any mind, they all crazy.”
She reconstructs those halcyon days in loosely assembled, vividly impressionistic scenes: a funeral she attended with Willie May, vacations in coastal Georgia, days spent at camp and on elementary-school field trips, visits from her Scroogelike grandfather, “Daddy Jack,” and her blind grandmother, “Big Mama.” In her teens, she turns boy-crazy, a trait that continues into young adulthood; she logs page after page of crushes, first loves and the rounds of dating that accompanied her college years. In the background, her parents slowly collapse.
Eventually, Mayes grew to resent her parents’ gloomy, self-destructive freefall and began to plot her getaway. “If I ever get out of here,” she writes, “I will never select unhappiness. When the plate of unhappiness is passed around and more and more is offered, I’ll say no thank you, no. But they wanted seconds, thirds.”
The idea for “Under Magnolia” dates back to the 1990s, when Mayes wrote and published several autobiographical pieces, then shelved them over objections from family members.
It's not hard to see why. Mayes has shrugged off her "good girl training" in favor of "dare alla luce" — an Italian phrase meaning "give to the light" — and delivers a thorny memoir that strips away the polite Southern masks, sweet magnolias be damned.
Relatives could not have been thrilled with the pitiless description of Garbert’s protracted illness — “he dies for three years, while I rise, making my escape from childhood” — and the cold disgust Mayes feels when, at 14, she ignores his pleas to keep him company in his sickroom.
Nor does she sugarcoat descriptions of her family’s racism, so commonplace that she has “no clear idea why” it embarrasses her. When it comes to charting the Southern belle ethic and sexism of the day that will guide her for decades to come, Mayes paints unforgettable portraits. “Never learn to type,” bids an elderly aunt. “If you learn, you’ll have to do it. And no cooking,” she adds. Be careful, her mother warns Frances, “your brains are showing.”
Consequently, though she dreams of becoming a writer, the 22-year-old Mayes marries and follows her husband to grad school in California. "I will … I don't know what I will do," she writes. "Something." The memoir breaks off at that point, with a cryptic "The End/Beginning" that suggests the story is far from over.
Perhaps a sequel, “Under the California Sun”?
