Memoir of Appalachia tackles regional myths
Couric writing memoir
‘A ppalachia North: A Memoir’ (West Virginia University Press), by Matthew Ferrence. Since the 2016 election of President Donald Trump and the publication of J. D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” that same year, Appalachia has returned to the national spotlight as media and academia struggle to make sense of the region and its people. Who are the residents of an area that stretches from northern Alabama and Georgia, through Kentucky and West Virginia, all the way to southern New York?
Matthew Ferrence joins the debate with his new book, “Appalachia North: A Memoir,” but he’s here to clear up a few things: Pennsylvania is part of Appalachia and the area is more than its stereotypes. In fact, to understand Appalachia, one must look at its history, its contradictions and repeated attempts to redefine itself.
Using his personal story, Ferrence takes us into a world defined by its bodies of water, its hills and its defunct coal mining industry. The closed mines have polluted creeks and destroyed the economies of numerous communities.
Realities
Squatters and long-time residents remain in dilapidated homes others would have given up on. “But either because they can’t or because they refuse to leave, people tack new layers of tarpaper to the siding, or they duct-tape the broken windows, or slide concrete blocks under the worst sags, and stay,” Ferrence writes. Such realities aren’t signs of a culture in crisis, according to Ferrence, but examples of perseverance amid a changing economy.
Yet, it’s also a place of plateaus older than the American Southwest desert. It’s a place of animals and solitude that helped Ferrence fight a brain tumor. Whenever he has lived in places like Arizona or Paris, Ferrence realized he was in exile, even though he never thought of himself as from Appalachia growing up. No, Ferrence didn’t grow up smoking a corncob pipe or hearing stories of moonshining. But that’s not all that defines Appalachia.
An English professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, Ferrence doesn’t shy away from his middleclass upbringing that sheltered him from poverty and family dysfunction Vance cited in his memoir. Ferrence’s father was a biologist and his mother was a well-read private-school trained woman from Indiana.
Still, Ferrence refuses to pass judgment as others have on the struggle of Appalachia residents and appears to be in awe of how residents carry their struggles. To him, those struggles have also defined him.
“If I am writing through the recognition of myself as an Appalachian and also through the process of seeing myself as an Appalachian writer, I have to think about journeys,” he writes.
“Appalachia North” is a lyrical homage to a region often misunderstood and overlooked. Ferrence’s engulfing prose brings to life an Appalachia north of the Mason-Dixon line and he does it with the eye of an honest poet.
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NEW YORK: Katie Couric is writing a memoir, one she is counting on to live up to its title: “Unexpected.”
In an announcement Tuesday, the publisher Little, Brown and Company told The Associated Press that the book was scheduled for spring 2021. Couric plans to share details both “hilarious” and “humiliating” as she looks back on her prizewinning, 40-year career.
She will touch upon everything from the #MeToo movement, which led to the firing of her former “Today” show colleague Matt Lauer, to what her publisher is calling her own “proto#MeToo brushes with workplace sexism, like the time a highranking executive commented on her breast size in front of the top brass during an editorial meeting.” She also will write about the death from colon cancer of her first husband, Jay Monahan, and her own battles with bulimia and lifelong insecurity.
“I’ve been privileged to lead an extraordinary life, one that I never anticipated,” Couric, 62, said in a statement. “I’ve experienced so much, both professionally and personally, but have never really had an opportunity to reveal what was going on behind the scenes. I’m excited to share what it was like being at the center of so many historic events and game-changing stories.”