Through the Groves: A Memoir - Hardcover

Hull, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805093370 ISBN 13: 9780805093377

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, 2023

Synopsis

A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father's family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. "Look now," her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. "It will all be gone." But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter in white boots. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape. Here, Hull captures it all--the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women. Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who's ever left home to cut a path of their own.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Hull is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent nearly two decades as a reporter at the Washington Post. She is a fifth-generation Floridian who started her newspaper career at the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times). She lives in Washington, DC.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805093370
• ISBN 13: 9780805093377
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224