On Lee Smith’s ‘Dimestore: A Writer’s Life’
Smith’s memoir talks of family, mental illness, and her father’s dimestore that connects them all in a small town.
Lee Smith
Nonfiction | Memoir
202 pages
5.5” x 8.25”
Perfectbound Trade Paperback
Also available as hardcover, eBook, and audiobook
Review Format: Paperback
ISBN 978–616206468
First Edition
Algonquin Books
New York, New York
Available HERE
$15.95
Dimestore: A Writer’s Life explores the concept of what happens to memory and identity when the place of one’s youth becomes displaced by corporate big-box stores and the influx of university students in a small town that becomes a college town. The fast-paced and jarring evolution of Grundy, Virginia, serves as the catalyst for Smith’s writing career, as well. Although Grundy is known to most for its coal mining and sprawling mountains, it is Smith’s father’s dimestore that she equates the most with her hometown and her ‘truest’ writing material:
“This is an enviable life, to live in the terrain of one’s heart. Most writers don’t — can’t — do this. Most of us are always searching, through our work and in our lives: for meaning, for love, for home.
Writing is about these things. And as writers, we cannot choose our truest material. But sometimes we are lucky enough to find it.”
(p. 74).
These fifteen interconnected essays build a memoir whose beauty mimics the natural grit of the Appalachian South and prose that is poignant, engaging, and — at times — heartbreaking. The narrative is nostalgic without dripping in sentimentality, and remarks on loss of childhood spent assisting her father at the Ben Franklin dimestore that is washed away — figuratively and literally — as Grundy is relocated out of the flood zone. This is also a book about family. Smith’s mother suffers from depression, her father bipolar disorder, and her own musically gifted son has a mental illness with symptoms that show up in his twenties, where the only way to stabilize him is with medications that dull the music and his spirit.
Books, reading, writing, and teaching, all play a pivotal role in her essays as she shares the simultaneous surge of energy and anxieties she has about herself as a writer:
“And actually, I’m feeling a little intoxicated, the way I often feel here, the way I always feel when I’m starting a new novel, which I am — or will, as soon as I get up my nerve. It’s that old disorientation, that scary lightness of being, that moment before you spring off the diving board straight out into the shining air, head first. You could kill yourself, and you know it, and you’ve got to get to the point where you don’t care.
I’m not quite there yet.”
(p. 192).
However, it appears that she is there, but it’s not a novel where she takes the plunge; it’s Dimestore. There is a natural and lyrical cadence to Smith’s writing, and she doesn’t hold back in sharing the intimate details that inspired her to become the writer she always wanted to be.
