Winter Birds: A Novel - Softcover

Grimsley, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684829916 ISBN 13: 9780684829913

Publisher: Touchstone, 1997

Synopsis

In Jim Grimsley's remarkable first novel, Winter Birds, Danny Crell tells himself his own story, and in doing so illuminates the heartbreaking story of his father's violent tyranny over his mother, his sister, and his three younger brothers. The novel begins on Thanksgiving in rural North Carolina in a broken-down cottage the Crell children have nicknamed "The Circle House." Ellen Crell's attempts at a family meal are thwarted and finally disastrously ruined when Bobjay draws her into a violent quarrel. It leads to a chase wherein Bobjay is the hunter, Ellen the prey, and their five children are caught in between. Winter Birds is a haunting, unforgettable portrait of an American family shattered by violence, and of the lengths a woman will go to keep her family whole.

About this title

From the Author

This book had a long strange journey to publication.
This was the first book I wrote, and for a lot of reasons publishers were slow to respond to it. I finished the book in 1984 and sent it out to publishers and agents for a very long time. Finally in 1992 the book was published by a German publisher in translation, and I had the unusual sensation of having my first novel in my hands even though I couldn't read a word of it beyond the names. My German publisher then took the book on as a mission and found first a French publisher and then a publisher in the United States in 1994. Most of the people I sent the book to in this country were wary of the difficult family material, the violence of the father, and the unrelieved sadness of the situation. I was lucky that books like Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina changed people's minds about this kind of story.

About the Author

Jim Grimsley Jim Grimsley was born in 1955 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and like his character, Danny Crell, moved around a lot with his family, following his father from job to job. In an essay about his writing, called "True Fiction," Grimsley says, "We were always poor, moving from house to house, with our every move the subject of discussion by our neighbors in the small farm community where we lived." Like Bobjay Crell in Winter Birds, Grimsley's father had lost his arm in a farm accident and was every bit as heavy and abusive a drinker as Bobjay. One night, in a drunken rage, he went so far as to light the family home on fire while they were all barricaded inside, against him. Even so, Grimsley has some compassion for his father."My father wasn't at all prepared to be married or to be a father," he says, "and to all of a sudden have children -- children with big problems. They were terribly in debt by the time I was five. . . . Father not only lost his arm, he lost his job after he'd already waived his right to file for any kind of insurance claim. The farmer did him dirty. So he had all that anger, and he's 23 or 24 and his life is already ruined. I feel really bad when I think of that side of him. He kept us fed, he didn't give up, but he could never stop being just furious. The only people he had any power over in his life were his family." Sadly, Grimsley's father later committed suicide. Grimsley went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he studied creative writing. Around the time of his father's death, he began to write Winter Birds."I have vivid memories of my family, of the way we lived, and my writing feels very powerful when I am working out of this material," he says. "These memories are often very unpleasant and lead to stories that are cathartic to read, but hard to sell to publishers. But I think you really do see, in writers now

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684829916
• ISBN 13: 9780684829913
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226