Overview

Vivid, dramatic portraits of the author's ""misfit"" female ancestors and a candid, intimate memoir about family secrets and breaking free from the narrow confines of a ""proper Southern woman."" The Beak in the Heart is a memoir of growing up ""Southern."" Betina Enzminger shares the poignant tales of the Southern women who preceded her-misfit women who defied authority and suffered the consequences in the repressive South Carolina of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Entzminger links several generations of women from pre-Civil War years to the present, including Victoria, a former slave and concubine to her third great uncle, Rosalee, a great aunt committed to the state hospital for forty years, and Carrie, an aunt who unwittingly married a gay man at a time when divorce was not legal in South Carolina. She also shares candid details of her rebellious youth and her own struggles with marriage and parenthood. In exploring the lives of her spirited female relatives, Entzminger-their educated, rebellious, and misfit twenty-first-century descendant-restores their voices and finds inspiration in their courage and integrity. The Beak in the Heart speaks to all women, regardless of region of birth, who have felt that society has curbed their freedoms or silenced their voices.

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9781954566071

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Reviews

Betina Entzminger writes with searing honesty and homegrown lyricism. Line after perfect line, she tells the whole truth about a family of southern women who rebel against patriarchal constraints, hardscrabble women who support each other in order to live with authenticity and misfit integrity. Perhaps the most enthralling story here is the author's own-Entzminger weaves her tale of rambunctious adolescence and experimental parenthood among those of her relatives, both the living and the dead. The Beak in the Heart offers inspiration to anyone who ever struggled with family skeletons. In laying out the bones of her kinfolk, Entzminger offers us all a guide as to how we might learn from troubled heritage. -George Hovis, author of The Skin Artist Weaves vivid portraits of women in her family in a graceful way, dramatic at times, touching, happy and sad. She gives these women distinct voices, and their stories of hardship, injustice, and courage resonate with meaning that links generations from pre-Civil War years to the present. The book is thoughtful, intelligent, and deeply felt-a unique pleasure. -Deno Trakas, author of Messenger from Mystery and Because Memory Isn't Eternal: A Story of Greeks in Upstate South Carolina [Entzminger] discovers several sister dissenters, other women who pushed against the walls of propriety and expectations set up to confine women in the patriarchal South. Telling the stories of the presumed mad women in her family's attics and closets, she shows them sympathy and understanding they did not receive in their lifetimes and gains her reader's (and perhaps her own) sympathy and understanding about her own life choices. -Margaret D. Bauer, author of A Study of Scarletts: Scarlett O'Hara and Her Literary Daughters I learned not only about the writer's family, but truths about myself and about all women's lives. When I finished, I felt both affirmed and transformed. Here is the powerful story of a family of women, and here is the powerful story of all women. - Cherri Randall, author of The Memory of Orchids

Author Information

Betina Entzminger is a Southern-born writer and English professor, currently living and working in Pennsylvania. A quadruple divorcee and mother of two teenagers, Entzminger holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her academic publications include two books: ""The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and the Dark Seductress"" (LSU Press, 2001) and ""Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics"" (Routledge, 2012) and many essays on American literature.She loves traveling, gardening, southern history, genealogy, animals, and antiques. She is also a feminist who loves men.

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