She's Gone Country: Dispatches from a Lost Soul in the Heart of Dixie [Paperback]

Kyle Spencer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 2002 | Series: Vintage Original

Where does a single, twentysomething girl go for adventure when she’s been raised among Manhattan artists, drag queens, and intellectuals threatening to move to Cuba? If that girl is Kyle York Spencer, an aspiring newspaper reporter, she heads south, to North Carolina, to cut her chops at the Raleigh News & Observer.

Setting up shop in the Tar Heel state, Spencer finds herself interviewing everyone from skeet-shooting cowboys and Christian Rockers to the Human Carver--a serial killer--and the Smallest Woman in the World. Embraced by a sassy group of husband-hunting southern belles, she wonders whether sleeping with a Jesse Helms supporter is really part of the grand plan or if Mark, her best friend whose calls from LA provide a lifeline, is really the one. Picking up some valuable wisdom along the way, she learns that finding Mr. Right is far less important than surrounding yourself with the right people–and that making a home ultimately involves more than just deciding where to live.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At heart, she's Lois Lane, chasing her big scoop, which is just when "Lois feels so utterly like a stud she doesn't need to be sleeping with one." In real life, Spencer's a young reporter leaving New York City and her dysfunctional family for a new life in North Carolina, writing for Raleigh's News And Observer. Assigned to somewhat underwhelming stories, Spencer focuses on finding herself a hunk "[a] Raleigh cop, forest ranger, tobacco farmer." Researching a piece on clay pigeon shoots, she picks up what she thinks is her first good ol' boy, figuring on some juicy squirrel-eating stories, only to discover he's an overaged grad student in Asian Studies. Spencer's attracted to "inappropriate men" the same way she writes her news stories: fantasizing herself right into their worlds. While the man-hunting theme sustains the narrative, the dissolution of her father and stepmother's marriage and her unresolved relationship with her pal Mark round out the angst. Salvation for our picaresque heroine comes in the form of the "Ten Thousand Angels Committee," a gang of single women with a decidedly bad attitude. The "law of appropriate returns," they explain to Spencer, cautions women to not have sex on a cheap sushi date, or men will start expecting sex after coffee and a bagel or heaven forbid a smoothie. Later this law gets revised, since like communism, it sounds good in theory, but "we're all too greedy" for it to work. Spencer's wit is honest and endearing, and women readers will anxiously await her next hot installment.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

As a prelude to this lively and somewhat irreverent memoir, freelance journalist Spencer offers a disclaimer that not everything she says is true. "I changed some things," she reveals. "And I made some stuff up." As the story opens, Spencer's planned "escape" from a dysfunctional family and an aimless, avant-garde life style has taken her to North Carolina, where she joins the staff of the Raleigh Daily newspaper. Her new life in the South is full of relationships, dating, booze, sex, politics, and the trials and tribulations of being a female junior reporter. Neither the geographical separation nor the new environment assuage the pain of her involvement with her relatives, and she is continually frustrated in her search for stability in her personal and professional lives. Spencer's sober observations give some serious substance to a work that might otherwise be passed off as just a light read. Written in prose that moves right along, this book should be popular with public library patrons. Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred Communications Covering Catastrophe: How Broadcast Journalists in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania Reported September 11, 2001.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (May 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375709045
• ISBN-13: 978-0375709043
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,112,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Take me away, May 28, 2002

By 

Bill Hirst (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: She's Gone Country: Dispatches from a Lost Soul in the Heart of Dixie (Paperback)

Returning home from the hospital after visiting a very ill father I noticed a book I had purchased the same night my father had his stroke. It had been forgotten on the passenger seat where it was tossed. I brought the book in with me hoping it might take my mind off my father. Kyle Spencer is a good story teller. Her observations and recollections of her experiences had me laughing out loud. If your a dreamer that has crashed and burned a few times here's someone to relate to.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Puh-leez, June 27, 2002

By 

jim (Raleigh, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: She's Gone Country: Dispatches from a Lost Soul in the Heart of Dixie (Paperback)

The premise of this book is preposterous...that Raleigh, NC is "country" or the "Heart of Dixie." The Raliegh-Durham area, (aka the Triangle)is a congested, urban and metropolitan locale which is headquarters to IBM and Duke University, and 60% of the population is relocated northerners. The neighboring town of Cary is jokingly referred to as the "Containment are for Re-located Yankees." The fact that someone could write a book about their experiences in Raleigh and refer to it as a journey to the South, and describe culture shock related to that experience, is just ridiculous. Maybe Jackson, Mississippi, or Gulfport, Louisiana, but Raleigh? Come on...
The three stars I did give the book are based on Spencer's description of being a cub news reporter, and are the only parts I enjoyed. If the book had just been about herwork experiences, it would have been so much better. Instead, a lot of it is whining about the trials and trtibulations of growing up a well-fed New Yorker, or silliness about her experiences in "the South." Whatever...

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars She needs to make up her mind!, November 28, 2004

By 

mojosmom (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: She's Gone Country: Dispatches from a Lost Soul in the Heart of Dixie (Paperback)

Kyle Spencer, an aspiring newspaper reporter, leaves New York City to work at the Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer.

I think Spencer couldn't make up her mind what book she wanted to write, "A New York Journalist Goes South", "My Dysfunctional Family", or "How to Find a Man". So she tried to put all three together, and doesn't quite pull it off, resulting in an uneven quality to the book.

Despite the "Dysfunctional Family Tree" at the start of the book, which was amusing, those parts of the book were the least interesting, and seemed almost tacked on. I would very much have liked to have had more about her experiences at the News & Observer, and the exploits of the Ten Thousand Angels Committee (four women looking for men for themselves and each other) were pretty funny.

She's a good writer, but she needed someone to force her to choose among three good themes.