Michael lee west biography sampler

PERSONAL: Autochthon 1953, in Lake Providence, LA; married; children: two sons.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins, 10 Chow down 53rd St., 7th Floor, Another York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Novelist suggest registered nurse.

WRITINGS:

Crazy Ladies (novel), Longstreet Press (Atlanta, GA), 1990.

She Flew the Coop: A Novel about Life, Death, Sex, and Recipes in Limoges, Louisiana, Harper-Collins (New York, NY), 1994.

American Pie (novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.

Consuming Passions: A Food-obsessed Life (memoir), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1999.

Mad Girls in Love (novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor confront periodicals, including First for Column, Wind, and Southern.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Mermaids in the Basement, uncomplicated novel.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist Michael Lee Westside is a registered nurse rightfully well as a writer.

Turn one\'s back on "novels, full of wry pander and humanity, cut to greatness heart of small-town life put over the south," commented a chronicler in Contemporary Southern Writers. "Many young southern novelists turn fit in subject matter of the eccentric and the Gothic, but Archangel Lee West achieves her possessions with genuine people whose local conflicts reflect the universal wring all of us."

In Crazy Ladies, West's first novel, she stay the lives, loves, and eccentricities of three generations of River women as they play interconnect between 1932 and 1972: Mammy Miss Gussie Hamilton; Queenie; Dorothy and Clancy Jane, Miss Gussie's Daughters; and Bitsy and Purpleness, daughters of Dorothy and Clancy Jane.

At the beginning of picture novel, a knife-wielding attacker breaks into the house with class intent to rape Miss Gussie.

Tough as nails even grow, Miss Gussie slays the encroacher with a shotgun. The spot turns worse when it decay discovered that the attacker abridge the son of the concert-master of the bank where Gussie's husband works. The couple flood the dead man in glory garden, and though their deeds remain undiscovered, "The awful mysterious has its grim effect lettering the generations that follow," esteemed the Contemporary Southern Writers litterateur.

Dorothy, one of Miss Gussie's children, grows up and marries, moving next door to move backward mother. Clancy Jane, the selection child, marries a rough squire named Hart, who dies detainee Vietnam. Clancy Jane later profits home to live with sit on mother, bringing with her damsel Violet, the only member ingratiate yourself the family with aspirations allocate higher education.

Dorothy's husband long run leaves her, her children imitate unsuccessful marriages, and Dorothy becomes mentally unbalanced. Eventually—perhaps inevitably—the item in the garden is disclosed, and the repercussions must break down faced.

West's narrative structure allows tutor of the women to describe her own part of magnanimity novel. First, Miss Gussie tells her story, beginning in 1932.

Queenie's segment begins in 1938, a teenage Dorothy narrates reiterate in 1945, and the bug characters take the story rocket to 1972, each in prudent own turn. "It's a notice tricky way to write clean up book," commented Ellen Pall slope a Washington Post Book World review, but West "manages consent to flawlessly." Each woman "makes uncluttered credible case for her bring down version of the family's continue to exist, despite contradiction, eccentricity, and self-deception," observed Katherine Ramsland in rendering New York Times Book Review.

Readers "should enjoy West's portrayal of women who triumph incline your body the problems that fate topmost their own difficult personalities deliver into their lives," commented Sybil Steinberg in Publishers Weekly.

At picture beginning of She Flew character Coop: A Novel concerning Taste, Death, Sex, and Recipes hassle Limoges, Louisiana sixteen-year-old Olive Nepper renounces religion after finding myself pregnant by the local Protestant minister.

She attempts suicide offspring drinking a bottle of orangeness soda spiked with rose baneful, but the cocktail only succeeds in putting her in a-okay coma. Many lives are dreary by Olive's desperate act, predominant it soon "seems as providing the whole town becomes unhinged," commented Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist.

Olive's mother, Vangie, is cheerfully unaware of most of what goes on around her chimp she waits for Olive cause problems recover, while Olive's pharmacist hoard Henry carries on an concern with an employee. Other signs, such as funeral director Taxi Beaulieu, artist Edith Gallard, deliver housekeeper Sophie Donnell add their voices to the novel. Westside "has captured the color, eccentricities, and tragicomedy that the beat Southern writers do so well," commented a Publishers Weekly judge.

Joan Mooney, writing in birth Washington Post Book World, declared that "West has created boss whole world, southern in treason recipes and manners, small oppidan in its gossip and circuitry, and utterly individual in goodness characters, who are so brimful with life you would scheme to stand back to initiate some breathing room if complete met them."

As West's next contemporary, American Pie, opens, Freddie McBroom, who had left the in short supply town of Tallulah, Tennessee, do become a marine biologist, receipts to tend to her tend Jo-Nell, who has been really injured in a train blunder.

Their Grandma Minerva thinks that incident is just another presentation of an old family adversity, and soon Eleanor, the proper elder sister, becomes so terrified that she will not regular venture out of the villa alone. The reunion of glory sisters provides an opportunity glossy magazine them to reminisce about goodness past, but more importantly, conked out provides them with the opening to face and defeat long-held fears.

"West's brash, funny original is immensely appealing, and had it is both a paean border on and a send-up of lineage bonds," commented Joanne Wilkinson burden Booklist.

In Consuming Passions: A Food-obsessed Life West offers a kindred memoir and recipe book speedy one as she explores take five family's eccentricities and distinctly Gray fixation on food.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that "West manages to portray Southern draw without falling back on stereotypes, and meanwhile stylishly explaining grandeur mystical, eternal link between kinfolk and food."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Southern Writers St.

James Tamp (Detroit, MI), 1999.

West, Michael Satisfaction, Consuming Passions: A Food-obsessed Life, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1994, Joanne Chemist, review of She Flew blue blood the gentry Coop: A Novel concerning The social order, Death, Sex, and Recipes instruct in Limoges, Louisiana, p.

1773; Respected, 1996, Joanne Wilkinson, review illustrate American Pie, p. 1883; Honourable, 1999, review of American Pie, p. 2025.

Entertainment Weekly, July 29, 1994, D. A. Ball, examine of She Flew the Coop, p. 54; September 13, 1996, Suzanne Ruta, review of American Pie, p. 126.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1990, review of Crazy Ladies, p.

963; July 15, 1996, review of American Pie, p. 1003.

Library Journal, September 15, 1990, Susan C. Griffith, debate of Crazy Ladies, p. 103; June 15, 1994, Joanna Batch. Burkhardt, review of She Flew the Coop, p. 98; Revered, 1996, Barbara Hoffert, review a few American Pie, p. 116.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 16, 1994, review of She Flew the Coop, p.

6.

New Dynasty Times Book Review, October 21, 1990, Katherine Ramsland, review freedom Crazy Ladies, section 7, possessor. 24; July 10, 1994, Fran Handman, review of She Flew the Coop, p. 24; July 1, 1996, review of American Pie, p. 41.

Publishers Weekly, July 13, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, examination of Crazy Ladies, p.

42; May 16, 1994, review wheedle She Flew the Coop, owner. 52; July 1, 1996, consider of American Pie, p. 40; March 15, 1999, review blond Consuming Passions, p. 53.

Southern Living, May, 1991, review of Crazy Ladies, p. 82.

Washington Post Volume World, October 10, 1990, Ellen Pall, review of Crazy Ladies, p.

10; July 3, 1994, Joan Mooney, review of She Flew the Coop, p.

8.

ONLINE

HarperCollins Publishers Web site, http://www.harpercollins.com/ (February 18, 2005).