Unveiling Hidden Truths: Emilee Hackney’s Appalachian Memoir Reveals What Lies Beneath the Surface
Feeling spiritually and culturally homeless, Hackney turns to joyless sex, drinking binges, and antidepressants. It’s only when she’s encouraged to write by three influential teachers—one of whom is Michael Pollan—that Hackney begins, finally, to navigate the vast and varied reality beneath the unforgiving and ugly surface perceptions. An essay on tomatoes opens her eyes to the whole world of Appalachia that no one sees, that needs to be seen.
Always, there is balance. She counters a memory of her maternal grandfather as a kind, silent, sober man with her mother’s experience of the same man before he quit booze: a lugubrious drunk who railed against the “upper echelon” that was keeping him down. Visiting a cemetery, she notes how “[t]heir headstones were scattered among rainbow polyester bouquets of an open-armed Jesus, whose pale stone skin was veiled with mold.”
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