It took me a long time to finish this book because I refused to read the stories back-to-back. In a collection of short stories like this, written by one author, it can be tempting to just read one after the other and then then before you know it, you've finished them all and don't really remember much. Kind of like eating Oreos out of the box.

It's hard for me to articulate what it is exactly that I loved so much about these stories, aside of course from the impeccable voices and excellent writing, but I'll try. The characters are all small town women with seemingly small town lives, but once they get talking you see how big it all really is. But, at the same time, small. Often these characters go into deep detail about their past adventures which include things that we'd lament over (or at least I would lament over) and perhaps give us ulcers or a stay at a nice safe hospital for a while. And these events are just ticked off with the same cadence and weight as other things. It's all just life after all, these things happen to everyone, just in the course of living.

A sampling of the sort of thing I'm talking about:

Paul had been drunk, of course. Drunk, or he might not have lived at all, somebody said later, but I don't know whether that was true or not. I think it is something people say after wrecks, whenever there's been drinking. He had been driving back to W&L from Randolph-Macon, where he was dating a girl. This girl wrote Mama a long, emotional letter on pink stationary with a burgundy monogram. Paul was taken by ambulance from the small hospital in Lexington, Virginia, to the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville, one of the best hospitals in the world. This is what everybody told me. Mama went up there immediately. Her younger sister, my aunt Liddie, came to stay with us while she was gone.

I leave the book feeling empowered like I'd just read a self-help book (which I would never do). Her characters are inspirational. They encourage you to just do whatever it is you've been wanting to do and then don't sweat it because if it doesn't work out how you'd hoped, you can just write it all down and entertain people with the tale someday.