Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir [Hardcover]

Lise Funderburg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 13, 2008

Pig Candy is the poignant and often comical story of a grown daughter getting to know her dying father in his last months. During a series of visits with her father to the South he'd escaped as a young black man, Lise Funderburg, the mixed-race author of the acclaimed Black, White, Other, comes to understand his rich and difficult background and the conflicting choices he has had to make throughout his life.

Lise Funderburg is a child of the '60s, a white-looking mixed-race girl raised in an integrated Philadelphia neighborhood. As a child, she couldn't imagine what had made her father so strict, demanding, and elusive; about his past she knew only that he had grown up in the Jim Crow South and fled its brutal oppression as a young man. Then, just as she hits her forties, her father is diagnosed with advanced and terminal cancer -- an event that leads father and daughter together on a stream of pilgrimages to his hometown in rural Jasper County, Georgia. As her father's escort, proxy, and, finally, nurse, Funderburg encounters for the first time the fragrant landscape and fraught society -- and the extraordinary food -- of his childhood.

In succulent, evocative, and sometimes tart prose, the author brings to life a fading rural South of pecan groves, family-run farms, and pork-laden country cuisine. She chronicles small-town relationships that span generations, the dismantling of her own assumptions about when race does and doesn't matter, and the quiet segregation that persists to this day. As Funderburg discovers the place and people her father comes from, she also, finally, gets to know her magnetic, idiosyncratic father himself. Her account of their thorny but increasingly close relationship is full of warmth, humor, and disarming candor. In one of his last grand actsFunderburg's father recruits his children, neighbors, and friends to throw a pig roast -- an unforgettable meal that caps an unforgettable portrait of a man enjoying his life and loved ones right up through his final days.

Pig Candy takes readers on a stunning journey that becomes a universal investigation of identity and a celebration of the human will, familial love, and, ultimately, life itself.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Funderburg, author of the highly acclaimed Black, White, Other (1994), accompanied her dying father on his annual journey from Philadelphia to the small town of Monticello, Georgia, where he owned a family farm. He was a gentleman farmer, employing others to work his 126-acre farm in a town where the number of black farmers was dwindling. Funderburg details her father’s obsession with securing a pig to test his new roasting device and his chemotherapy treatments for prostrate cancer, which had returned after 15 years of remission. But at the root of their visit is a revisiting of the family and town history. Her grandfather was a physician and, like most of the family, fair-skinned enough to pass for white. They, too, felt the restrictions and cruelty of racism, though her grandfather’s coloring and profession gave him the status to challenge racism. Her father had a similar disposition, and his bitterness about the racial struggle created an emotional distance the author was only able to overcome in her father’s latter years. As she reveals her family’s complex history, Funderburg reveals the complexities of American racism. --Vanessa Bush

Review

"Pig Candy is a candid and moving memoir of a daughter's deep love for her father both when he is most difficult to love and impossible not to. Unforgettable and powerful, we are changed for the better by every page of it." -- Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying

"With Pig Candy, Lise Funderburg has achieved something very remarkable in contemporary memoir: a personal narrative that is crisply intelligent rather than cleverly self-satisfied, deeply and meaningfully emotional rather than soppily sentimental. Even better, she has used her considerable powers -- of private observation, of social empathy, and of historical imagination -- to transform an already gripping personal narrative into an overwhelming parable about race, family, and mortality. A wonderful book." -- Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost

"With a daughter's compassion and a journalist's precision, Lise Funderburg recounts the final years of her father's life on his farm in Georgia. But Pig Candy is more than simply the story of George Newton Funderburg. It's an extraordinary portrait of how a difficult place shapes a man, how a daughter loves a challenging father, and how the act of remembering even the most painful aspects of our personal and collective histories can make us whole." -- Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (May 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416547665
• ISBN-13: 978-1416547662
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #274,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lise Funderburg was born in 1959 and educated at Reed College and Columbia University. Her latest book is a memoir and social history called "Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home" (Free Press), which is a contemplation of life, death, and barbecue. Her first book was a collection of oral histories, "Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity," the first to explore the lives of adult children of black-white unions. She has been a regular contributor since 2001 to O, the Oprah Magazine and has written a book about the Tony-winning musical "The Color Purple." Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared widely in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, Salon, Newsday, and other publications.

Funderburg won a 2003 Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has twice been selected as the writer-in-residence at The James Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. She has received grants from the Dick Goldensohn Fund for Journalists, The Leeway Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation. Funderburg has been awarded residencies at The Blue Mountain Center and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, John Howard, as well as an ancient beagle called Beagle.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pig Candy, Pickled Peaches, Farming; The Making of a Georgia Community, July 27, 2008

By 

Dera R Williams (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir (Hardcover)

Lise Funderburg wrote a moving memoir in tribute to her dying father in Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir. The author of Black, White, Other details the last few years of her father's life and the dynamics of their relationship during their travels to rural Jasper County, Georgia, George Funderburg's hometown. Funderburg had a distant relationship with her father for most of her life. She always felt she had to walk on eggshells around him, even as a little girl. George was a demanding, sometimes impossible man who intimidated those around him. Funderburg made the trek with her father several times to his Monticello, Georgia farm from the East Coast where the layers of his life and legacy were revealed to his daughter, peeled away like an onion, sometimes with tears.

George's father, Frederick Douglas Funderburg, was the town doctor who served both the black and white communities beginning in the 1920s. His illustrious climb from rural roots in Alabama to entry into the Columbia University medical program and then tenure in an all-white medical corps in the U.S. Military was possible because of his white-looking appearance. The Funderburgs were of the elite Monticello African American community because of Dr. Funderburg's stature and his keen business acumen at a time of Jim Crow racism and perilous race relations.

George Funderburg attended segregated schools and attended Morehouse College, a men's black college in Atlanta, married twice and had a family while accumulating wealth through lucrative real estate and business ventures in Philadelphia. The matter of race was not a discussion topic George broached with his three daughters and became less of a priority after he and their white mother divorced when Lise, the youngest, was twelve years old. Yet race evidently permeated George's psyche, so much so that he warned his daughter of "Klan Sneaks" referring to the time in his youth when the KKK would make surprise attacks on unsuspecting blacks.


Monticello proved to be quite an education of sorts for Funderburg as she learned to decipher her father's hometown amongst a colorful cast of relatives, friends, employees and associates in the new millennium juxtaposed against the era of his childhood. Although the town had taken down the visible symbols of segregation, the "White Only" signs and now black and white residents easily intermingled in most cases, some becoming successful landowners and part of the community's political infrastructure, there were the underlying subtle signs of yesteryear---self segregation in eating facilities and social situations. When George and his entourage would roll into town, he was the catalyst for the mixing of races with his impromptu parties where the food was plentiful, including the Pig Candy, aptly named for the whole pigs roasted in a specially concocted seasoning mixture. As an adult, Funderburg came to think of her father as a "race man"; perhaps, yet it was difficult for me to get that in this discourse as it is written. I kept waiting for that final layer to be peeled, to reveal the naked core of George's life; there seemed to be so much more to be said. However, this is a worthy read, well-written and well researched of Jasper County's geographical, economical and social/racial history. I recommend for those who enjoy memoirs that delve into the intricacies of familial relationship, especially fathers and daughters.


Dera R. Williams
APOOO BookClub

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memorable, poignant and vivid!, May 30, 2008

By 

S. Cross (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir (Hardcover)

George Newton Fundenberg is a cantankeous, opionated, black man from rural Georgia who married a white woman, moved to the North, became a successful real estate broker and is the proud father of three daughters. He is difficult to get along with and even more difficult to please. His daughter, Lise, is determined to do just that, get along with and please him before he dies. In the process, she is introduced to the Southern tradition of roasted pig (pig candy), Southern hospitality and Jim Crow laws. This is a beautifully written, vividly painted memoir and a worthwhile read in its own right. Anyone who has dealt with an aging, ailing parent will identify with Lise's struggles and preserverance to bring her relationship with her father to a healthy but loving closure for both of them.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's also funny!, June 3, 2008

By 

lukelover - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir (Hardcover)

no plot review could do the magic of this book justice--because it's not so much what happens: pickling peaches, say, or, visiting doctors, diners, and rib purveyers. it's the comedic timing, the brilliant, telling details and writing so fine that you can't get through more than a dozen pages without underlining a sentence or two. also, lise is a reliable and honorable narrator who helps you now only understand her relationships but create your own with the complete and complicated characters in the book. it's just too good not to read.