Clear Springs: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Bobbie Ann Mason (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 1999

In this superb memoir, the bestselling author of In Country and other award-winning books tells her own story, and the story of a Kentucky farm family, the Masons of Clear Springs. Like Russell Baker's Growing Up, Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain, and other classic literary memoirs, Clear Springs takes us back in time to recapture a way of life that has all but disappeared, a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. Clear Springs is also an American woman's odyssey, exploring how a misfit girl who dreamed of distant places grew up in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.
        
A multilayered narrative of three generations--Bobbie Ann Mason, her parents and grandparents--Clear Springs gracefully interlaces several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the industrious life on a Kentucky farm to travels around the South with Mason as president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club; from the hippie lifestyle of the 1960s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a farmhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from pop music concerts to a small rustic schoolhouse. Clear Springs depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, as well as to Bobbie Ann Mason herself. When the movie of Mason's bestselling novel In Country is filmed near Clear Springs, it brings the first limousines to town, even as it brings out once again the wisdom and values of Mason's remarkable parents. Her mother,  especially, stands at the center of this book. Mason's journey leads her to a recognition of the drama and significance of her mother's life and to a new understanding of heritage, place, and family roots.
        
Brilliant and evocative, Clear Springs is a stunning achievement.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bobbie Ann Mason's marvelously tactile and textured memoir has the same blunt yet supple prose that distinguishes her novels In Country and Feather Crowns. Examining her roots in rural Kentucky, where she was born in 1940, Mason unravels her family's history and considers its impact on her as a person and a writer. Readers of the New Yorker will recognize a few excerpts, most notably the magical chapter on a local pop group in particular, and the siren song of rock & roll in general. Mason has woven the pieces of her story into a seamless whole limning her ambivalent relationship to her country roots. She was a bookish girl who fled to college and the sophisticated North before realizing that her fictional material and her heart were still down South. But when she bought land in Kentucky, it was "a long way from [home]. I had to keep some distance, keep my options open." Although her immediate family members all get loving, unsentimental treatment, the book is in essence a tribute to Mason's mother, whose free spirit never had a chance to roam as her daughter's did and who grabs center stage in the final chapter. This memoir is quintessential Mason in its strong storytelling, seeming simplicity, and deep mystery. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Readers of Mason's fiction may have wondered whether the white, working class, small-town Kentucky she depicts is real or "made up." This memoir makes clear that her work is deeply rooted in her own experience. When Mason first left Clear Springs to attend college, she felt ashamed of being from the South, fearing that people might see her as "a walking, mute mannequin of Southern Gothic horror in high heels and a beehiveAor worse, a baton twirler with a police dog." Gradually, she learned to accept her roots; this book is a loving embrace of that place and its people and a richly textured portrait of a rapidly disappearing way of life. However, those looking for deep psychological insight will not find it here. Nor will this memoir make Mason's family stop speaking to her: her attitude is that of an appreciative and respectful daughter. Although not all the characters are angelic, she finds reasons, if not justification, for even the alternately weak and controlling behavior of the mother-in-law who nearly ruined her beloved mother's life. In the first half of the book, Mason uses luxurious, larruping (Kentuckian for good enough to eat) language to evoke the sounds, taste, smells and sights of early childhood. In the second, weaker part, Mason helps her aging mother, Christy, move off the family farm into town, asks her questions and listens to her silences, hints and memories, out of which Mason constructs a version of how her mother, grandmother and great grandparents may have experienced various events in their lives. The resulting narrative, a somewhat tentative mixture of fiction and social history, is still compelling, but the prose never quite gels. Though Mason's strong grounding makes this memoir absorbing, it also prevents it from taking off in a risky, free-floating flight.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (April 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679449256
• ISBN-13: 978-0679449256
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,764,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The author remembers and revisits her Kentucky home, October 5, 2002

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Clear Springs: A Family Story (Paperback)

I'm an appreciative fan of Bobbie Ann Mason's short stories, about rural people raised with traditional values now somewhat at sea in a world of consumerism, pop culture, and a new morality. Young adults, whose parents would have stuck with a marriage come hell or high water, now divorce and drift through relationships. Their parents tied to the land and other life-long occupations, Mason's post-war generation is less rooted, freed of conventional beliefs, but often at a loss about what to believe in. Most striking as America grows increasingly urban, Mason's people continue to inhabit a rural landscape -- more worldly than their forebears, but not more sophisticated.

While some readers of Mason's stories and novels may have been puzzled by the point of view in them (ironic? matter of fact? sentimental?), this wonderful memoir should do much to clear up that ambiguity. Here a reader is introduced to the world of day-to-day experience that these narratives have emerged from. And you can begin to see how the matter of fact, ironic, and sentimental blend into a perspective that is distinctly rural American. The strongest individual (who is surely the source of many of Mason's fictional characters) is without doubt her mother, a remarkable woman with a quizzical sense of humor, a colorful manner of speaking, and a long view that comes of witnessing much of the 20th century at first hand.

A list of highlights in this book would go on for pages; there's just so much to savor and enjoy. There's Mason's own unsophisticated childhood (barefoot summers, crushes on pop stars, rock and roll fandom), the making of the film "In Country," and the continuing transformation of the rural Kentucky environment from horse-and-buggy days to the invasion of agribusiness -- a huge processing plant has sprung up across the road from the family farm.

I recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Mason's fiction. It is rich with thoughtful and well-observed detail reaching back across three generations of family history.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars lovely memoir, I'm a KY expat as well, October 6, 1999

By 

Rosemary Sallee (Los Alamos, NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clear Springs: A Memoir (Hardcover)

My family's roots are in the Mayfield, KY area, so this was a beautiful memoir of a woman born and raised in KY who moves elsewhere only to return. I loved it, I too am a Kentuckian who has moved on to other places, perhaps to return later in life. Her characters were incredibly real to me; I think anyone with a rural past who is trying to make sense of who they are and where they fit into the wider world would love and identify with this lovely work.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memories of Bygone Times, October 23, 2000

By 

"bunnygirl-12" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clear Springs: A Family Story (Paperback)

I really enjoyed this book a lot! I didn't just read it; I pored over it and savored every word. "Clear Springs" is the family history of Bobbie Ann Mason, a woman born and raised in Kentucky. It explores not only her own memories of growing up in rural Kentucky, but also those of her mother and grandmother--three generations of women. The details are wonderful. Reading this book makes you feel as if these women are people you know - maybe your neighbors or relatives in your own family. This book takes you back to a time when life was simpler in some ways, but more complicated in other ways. I especially enjoyed the photos of Bobbie's family members in the middle of the book. I would be reading the story and then go flip back to the pictures to envision these people in my mind as I thought about their lives. It really brought the characters to life in a more vivid way. What a valuable way of preserving her memories of a people, a place, and a way of life gone by in the words of this book! With all of the millions of people in the United States, one might think their own life is fairly insignificant; however, when you read this book, one realizes that everyone has a story to tell, their own personal history from their special era in which they lived. This book is like a little slice of America. I recommend it to all! Happy Reading!