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Clear Springs: A Memoir
In this superb memoir, the bestselling author of In Country and other award-winning books tells her own story, and the story of a Kentucky farm family, the Masons of Clear Springs. Like Russell Baker's Growing Up, Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain, and other classic literary memoirs, Clear Springs takes us back in time to recapture a way of life that has all but disappeared, a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. Clear Springs is also an American woman's odyssey, exploring how a misfit girl who dreamed of distant places grew up in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.
A multilayered narrative of three generations--Bobbie Ann Mason, her parents and grandparents-- Clear Springs gracefully interlaces several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the industrious life on a Kentucky farm to travels around the South with Mason as president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club; from the hippie lifestyle of the 1960s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a farmhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from pop music concerts to a small rustic schoolhouse. Clear Springs depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, as well as to Bobbie Ann Mason herself. When the movie of Mason's bestselling novel In Country is filmed near Clear Springs, it brings the first limousines to town, even as it brings out once again the wisdom and values of Mason's remarkable parents. Her mother, especially, stands at the center of this book. Mason's journey leads her to a recognition of the drama and significance of her mother's life and to a new understanding of heritage, place, and family roots.
Brilliant and evocative, Clear Springs is a stunning achievement.
A multilayered narrative of three generations--Bobbie Ann Mason, her parents and grandparents-- Clear Springs gracefully interlaces several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the industrious life on a Kentucky farm to travels around the South with Mason as president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club; from the hippie lifestyle of the 1960s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a farmhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from pop music concerts to a small rustic schoolhouse. Clear Springs depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, as well as to Bobbie Ann Mason herself. When the movie of Mason's bestselling novel In Country is filmed near Clear Springs, it brings the first limousines to town, even as it brings out once again the wisdom and values of Mason's remarkable parents. Her mother, especially, stands at the center of this book. Mason's journey leads her to a recognition of the drama and significance of her mother's life and to a new understanding of heritage, place, and family roots.
Brilliant and evocative, Clear Springs is a stunning achievement.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
53 people are currently reading
482 people want to read
About the author
Bobbie Ann Mason
89 books218 followersBobbie Ann Mason has won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her books include In Country and Feather Crowns. She lives in Kentucky.
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March 4, 2024
Clear Springs is the town at the center of the region of rural western Kentucky where novelist Bobbie Ann Mason was born and raised. And as Mason describes the region in her 1999 memoir Clear Springs, it was an area that offered the attractions of a slow-paced, rural life lived close to nature. At the same time, however, as Mason makes clear, life around Clear Springs, Kentucky, could be limiting – particularly for women – and the twists and turns of Mason’s journey from Kentucky farm girl to award-winning novelist become emblematic of the changes that characterized American life over the course of the 20th century.
Bobbie Ann Mason’s work has long since achieved canonical status within the continuum of modern Southern U.S. literature – to the extent that I wish you luck getting through any Southern-lit college or university course without being assigned her story “Shiloh.” That evocative little story of a Kentucky truck driver whose disabling on-the-job injury complements his crumbling marriage contains many of the characteristics that have long appealed to Mason’s many and devoted readers – deft characterizations, a carefully conveyed Southern setting, and a thematic focus on change and loss, especially as experienced by women. Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) won a Hemingway Foundation prize; her novel In Country (1985), about the daughter of a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veteran, was adapted by Norman Jewison into a film that starred Bruce Willis and Joan Allen. In short, Mason travelled a long way from that farm in western Kentucky.
Clear Springs is Mason’s memoir of that journey. In the early chapters of the book, Mason chronicles her growing-up years in that rural landscape. Observing the lives and ways of her mother and grandmother, Mason draws for the reader a portrait of a world where women’s lives are a continuing cycle of farm labour, the bearing and rearing of children, and a subtle but unmistakable subordination to men. What Mason says of her grandmother – “She didn’t reveal or explain. Plain facts sufficed” (p. 51) – might have been true of many generations of women in Graves County, Kentucky.
Readers who admire Mason’s gifts for delineation of character, as demonstrated in stories like “Shiloh” and novels like In Country, will no doubt hear echoes of those elements of her fiction in her setting-forth of what she learned from her mother and grandmother:
From Granny, I got the notion that I could have things just the way I wanted them, according to my own rules. From Mama, I got the notion that I could do everything. Granny was patient and forceful and certain. Mama was hurried, harried, rushed along by the stream of time and necessity. She slung out meals, gardens, crops, babies. She could cook supper and work all the buttonholes on a coat in the time it took Granny to boil out her stove burners. (p. 52)
Prior generations of the area around Clear Springs might have been forgiven for assuming that the region’s routines of rural life would continue, unaltered, for the foreseeable future. But Mason was growing up in a time of great change. Mason recalls the family turmoil she saw unfolding over the course of her teenage years, and considers how the changes that she saw in her family’s life reflected larger changes in American life:
Daddy grew more reserved. Having three girls and no son to carry on the farm must have overwhelmed and distanced him. I thought he treated Mama badly, mocking her and telling her she was dumb; he rarely made kind remarks or offered praise. By the time I was a junior, Mama was pregnant again. This time, at last, the baby was a boy – my little brother, Don. But after Don arrived, Daddy went into a yearlong depression. The son he had wanted to carry on the farm had come too late. He could see that the family farm in America was dying out as a way of life. (p. 101)
Mason broke with her family’s norms in small ways – attending the University of Kentucky at Lexington – and in big ways – moving to New York and seeking editorial work. She encountered the 1960’s counterculture in the North, and recounts that “The counterculture saved me.” While she avoided the drug scene, she found that “the psychedelic revolution – mainly through music – was transforming everything around me, fracturing objects and ideas like a light show at a concert” (p. 150).
I found that I could relate to Mason’s fascination with music like that of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles (she saw both Shea Stadium concerts, in 1965 and 1966); my parents, in the midst of an otherwise safe and conservative record collection in the living room of the family home in Bethesda, Maryland, had copies of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I played those albums constantly, feeling that I was being whisked away from the sedate comfort of suburbia and out into a larger world.
The death of Mason’s father eventually brings her back to Clear Springs, where she reflects on the differences of the different ways in which her father’s passing affects her and her mother:
We gathered at the old Mason homeplace. I sat among the Clear Springs kinfolks, in the heart of Mason history, wondering, trying to feel back through generations, feeling a huge separation from this past, because my father was gone. I was trying to dig at his roots, hoping to find them alive, as one sometimes does when a potted plant seems to die. I saw my mother looking around at the kitchen, where her aunt Rosie had once reigned, and I thought about her deep involvement with the Mason family. This house was where my mother grew up, was courted, and had left to make her life for fifty-four years with the handsome man she told me was “just larruping.” I could not know the vastness of this separation, this bereavement. (p. 202)
Eventually, it becomes necessary for Mason’s mother to move away from the farm, and into more of a neighbourhood setting close by – a major disruption for a woman who has always organized her life in accordance with the rhythms of rural farm life. Mason reflects on how this dramatic change demonstrates once again how much life in America has changed over the course of her and her mother’s lives:
I go over the terms of our violent uprooting, trying to get clear: for Mama, the burden of operating a farm will be alleviated, and yet the farm will still be hers, close by. She has a good place to live in her old age, but she can still go fishing here, in her own pond. These small goals are accomplished with the aid of lawyers, tax accountants, and real-estate agents, in an operation as arcane as a tax audit. Nothing is simple anymore. To move Mama a couple of miles takes all the magic of the modern world: estate planners, title searchers, termite inspectors, veterinarians, insurance agents, cablevision providers, road maintenance crews, automobile mechanics, courthouse clerks, copying machines, fax machines, answering machines, billing systems, property surveyors, supermarkets, moving vans, pizza parlors, Chinese carryout emporia, florists, U.P.S., Federal Express, the Coca-Cola company, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, the airline industry, and the federal government. (p. 250)
I used to see Mason works like “Shiloh” referred to as “K-Mart realism” – meaning realist fiction that emphasizes the pervasive impact, on ordinary American lives in the late 20th century, of major consumer-service corporations. While some things have changed since this book was written in 1999 – K-Mart is not what it once was, and much more space would have to be given to Internet access and social-media connectivity – Mason’s points regarding the changing modern world remain valid.
In the context of assisting her mother with this move, Mason begins researching her family’s history, utilizing resources like local-newspaper archives and courthouse records. In the process, she uncovers some unsettling revelations regarding her forebears, in a manner that may seem familiar to readers of her fiction.
I always appreciate the Southern musicality of Mason’s prose style, and the keenness of her insights into human character and social norms. Any admirer of novels like In Country and short stories like “Shiloh” will, I think, enjoy Mason’s recounting of her journey home to Clear Springs.
Bobbie Ann Mason’s work has long since achieved canonical status within the continuum of modern Southern U.S. literature – to the extent that I wish you luck getting through any Southern-lit college or university course without being assigned her story “Shiloh.” That evocative little story of a Kentucky truck driver whose disabling on-the-job injury complements his crumbling marriage contains many of the characteristics that have long appealed to Mason’s many and devoted readers – deft characterizations, a carefully conveyed Southern setting, and a thematic focus on change and loss, especially as experienced by women. Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) won a Hemingway Foundation prize; her novel In Country (1985), about the daughter of a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veteran, was adapted by Norman Jewison into a film that starred Bruce Willis and Joan Allen. In short, Mason travelled a long way from that farm in western Kentucky.
Clear Springs is Mason’s memoir of that journey. In the early chapters of the book, Mason chronicles her growing-up years in that rural landscape. Observing the lives and ways of her mother and grandmother, Mason draws for the reader a portrait of a world where women’s lives are a continuing cycle of farm labour, the bearing and rearing of children, and a subtle but unmistakable subordination to men. What Mason says of her grandmother – “She didn’t reveal or explain. Plain facts sufficed” (p. 51) – might have been true of many generations of women in Graves County, Kentucky.
Readers who admire Mason’s gifts for delineation of character, as demonstrated in stories like “Shiloh” and novels like In Country, will no doubt hear echoes of those elements of her fiction in her setting-forth of what she learned from her mother and grandmother:
From Granny, I got the notion that I could have things just the way I wanted them, according to my own rules. From Mama, I got the notion that I could do everything. Granny was patient and forceful and certain. Mama was hurried, harried, rushed along by the stream of time and necessity. She slung out meals, gardens, crops, babies. She could cook supper and work all the buttonholes on a coat in the time it took Granny to boil out her stove burners. (p. 52)
Prior generations of the area around Clear Springs might have been forgiven for assuming that the region’s routines of rural life would continue, unaltered, for the foreseeable future. But Mason was growing up in a time of great change. Mason recalls the family turmoil she saw unfolding over the course of her teenage years, and considers how the changes that she saw in her family’s life reflected larger changes in American life:
Daddy grew more reserved. Having three girls and no son to carry on the farm must have overwhelmed and distanced him. I thought he treated Mama badly, mocking her and telling her she was dumb; he rarely made kind remarks or offered praise. By the time I was a junior, Mama was pregnant again. This time, at last, the baby was a boy – my little brother, Don. But after Don arrived, Daddy went into a yearlong depression. The son he had wanted to carry on the farm had come too late. He could see that the family farm in America was dying out as a way of life. (p. 101)
Mason broke with her family’s norms in small ways – attending the University of Kentucky at Lexington – and in big ways – moving to New York and seeking editorial work. She encountered the 1960’s counterculture in the North, and recounts that “The counterculture saved me.” While she avoided the drug scene, she found that “the psychedelic revolution – mainly through music – was transforming everything around me, fracturing objects and ideas like a light show at a concert” (p. 150).
I found that I could relate to Mason’s fascination with music like that of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles (she saw both Shea Stadium concerts, in 1965 and 1966); my parents, in the midst of an otherwise safe and conservative record collection in the living room of the family home in Bethesda, Maryland, had copies of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I played those albums constantly, feeling that I was being whisked away from the sedate comfort of suburbia and out into a larger world.
The death of Mason’s father eventually brings her back to Clear Springs, where she reflects on the differences of the different ways in which her father’s passing affects her and her mother:
We gathered at the old Mason homeplace. I sat among the Clear Springs kinfolks, in the heart of Mason history, wondering, trying to feel back through generations, feeling a huge separation from this past, because my father was gone. I was trying to dig at his roots, hoping to find them alive, as one sometimes does when a potted plant seems to die. I saw my mother looking around at the kitchen, where her aunt Rosie had once reigned, and I thought about her deep involvement with the Mason family. This house was where my mother grew up, was courted, and had left to make her life for fifty-four years with the handsome man she told me was “just larruping.” I could not know the vastness of this separation, this bereavement. (p. 202)
Eventually, it becomes necessary for Mason’s mother to move away from the farm, and into more of a neighbourhood setting close by – a major disruption for a woman who has always organized her life in accordance with the rhythms of rural farm life. Mason reflects on how this dramatic change demonstrates once again how much life in America has changed over the course of her and her mother’s lives:
I go over the terms of our violent uprooting, trying to get clear: for Mama, the burden of operating a farm will be alleviated, and yet the farm will still be hers, close by. She has a good place to live in her old age, but she can still go fishing here, in her own pond. These small goals are accomplished with the aid of lawyers, tax accountants, and real-estate agents, in an operation as arcane as a tax audit. Nothing is simple anymore. To move Mama a couple of miles takes all the magic of the modern world: estate planners, title searchers, termite inspectors, veterinarians, insurance agents, cablevision providers, road maintenance crews, automobile mechanics, courthouse clerks, copying machines, fax machines, answering machines, billing systems, property surveyors, supermarkets, moving vans, pizza parlors, Chinese carryout emporia, florists, U.P.S., Federal Express, the Coca-Cola company, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, the airline industry, and the federal government. (p. 250)
I used to see Mason works like “Shiloh” referred to as “K-Mart realism” – meaning realist fiction that emphasizes the pervasive impact, on ordinary American lives in the late 20th century, of major consumer-service corporations. While some things have changed since this book was written in 1999 – K-Mart is not what it once was, and much more space would have to be given to Internet access and social-media connectivity – Mason’s points regarding the changing modern world remain valid.
In the context of assisting her mother with this move, Mason begins researching her family’s history, utilizing resources like local-newspaper archives and courthouse records. In the process, she uncovers some unsettling revelations regarding her forebears, in a manner that may seem familiar to readers of her fiction.
I always appreciate the Southern musicality of Mason’s prose style, and the keenness of her insights into human character and social norms. Any admirer of novels like In Country and short stories like “Shiloh” will, I think, enjoy Mason’s recounting of her journey home to Clear Springs.
April 24, 2018
This author was the keynote speaker at this year's Southern Literary Festival earlier this month, held not so far from the area where she grew up. While the book is nearly twenty years old now, there is a timeless quality to some of her descriptions of farm life. She was born in 1940, so before the baby boom generation. The book is rich with detail about life on a western Kentucky farm in the early to mid twentieth century. The descriptions of her family members are so carefully crafted, by the end of the book, you feel you have met them and come to know their quirks. Her most thoughtful descriptions are of her mother, who married at seventeen. She meditates on the opportunities she herself has had, as compared to her mother, who spent most of her life in hard work, caring for others, living on her in-laws' farm. Ms. Mason is keenly aware of the stultifying limitations women faced not so long ago. She herself flew out into the big world, attending college, working in New York City, getting graduate degrees, teaching, becoming a writer. But she returned to Kentucky---not to her parent's farm, but to a city "nearer to an airport" on her own piece of rural land, where she could grow a garden and feel nature around her. When her mother became widowed and was the only person left on the farm, Ms. Mason went to help her mother pack up and move to a newer house in town. They would rent out the farm. The description of sifting through years of accumulated stuff sparked recognition in me. If you were raised by parents who lived through the Depression you will know what I mean. As she says on pages 243-244: "Clearly she cannot part with anything. The sorting and saving could occupy the rest of our lives, I realize when I see her poring over a drawer of rags and scraps.....'Maybe these end tables are something you can replace', I venture to suggest. 'They're not antique, and the veneer is wearing off.' 'No', she says flatly. 'I give too much for them to get rid of them. I'm keeping them'." Later, on page 244: "She can discard items of nostalgic value, but she will hang on to a tattered and begrimed old plastic shower curtain because 'it still has some wear in it'. My desire for simple order battles against the clutter of thrift." Helping her mother move brings Ms. Mason back to where she started her life, a circle. Her musings are poignant:
"For a long time, I've been preoccupied with why some folks stay and some stray.....It's an old question---the call of the hearth or the call of the wild? Should I stay or should I go? Who is better off, those who traipse around or those who spend decades in the same spot, growing roots? The way I see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally. The answer is the mingling of sunlight and shadow; it's ambiguity, not either-or. The best journeys spiral up and around---the journey of Odysseus on the wine-dark sea or Bloom in the winding streets of Dublin. In the Zen journey, when you return, you know for the first time where you came from. We're always yearning and wandering , whether we actually leave or not. In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home, a notion that something---our point of origin, our roots, the home country---is out there. It's a place where we belong, where we know who we are. Maybe it's in the past---we dream of our own clear springs---or maybe it's somewhere ahead." (pages 280-281)
This was a lovely, engrossing book. How fortunate this family is to have had Ms. Mason so beautifully capture their lives.
"For a long time, I've been preoccupied with why some folks stay and some stray.....It's an old question---the call of the hearth or the call of the wild? Should I stay or should I go? Who is better off, those who traipse around or those who spend decades in the same spot, growing roots? The way I see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally. The answer is the mingling of sunlight and shadow; it's ambiguity, not either-or. The best journeys spiral up and around---the journey of Odysseus on the wine-dark sea or Bloom in the winding streets of Dublin. In the Zen journey, when you return, you know for the first time where you came from. We're always yearning and wandering , whether we actually leave or not. In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home, a notion that something---our point of origin, our roots, the home country---is out there. It's a place where we belong, where we know who we are. Maybe it's in the past---we dream of our own clear springs---or maybe it's somewhere ahead." (pages 280-281)
This was a lovely, engrossing book. How fortunate this family is to have had Ms. Mason so beautifully capture their lives.
April 21, 2012
I'm an appreciative fan of Bobbie Ann Mason's short stories, about rural people raised with traditional values now somewhat at sea in a world of consumerism, pop culture, and a new morality. Young adults, whose parents would have stuck with a marriage come hell or high water, now divorce and drift through relationships. Their parents tied to the land and other life-long occupations, Mason's post-war generation is less rooted, freed of conventional beliefs, but often at a loss about what to believe in. Most striking as America grows increasingly urban, Mason's people continue to inhabit a rural landscape -- more worldly than their forebears, but not more sophisticated.
While some readers of Mason's stories and novels may have been puzzled by the point of view in them (ironic? matter of fact? sentimental?), this wonderful memoir should do much to clear up that ambiguity. Here a reader is introduced to the world of day-to-day experience that these narratives have emerged from. And you can begin to see how the matter of fact, ironic, and sentimental blend into a perspective that is distinctly rural American. The strongest individual (who is surely the source of many of Mason's fictional characters) is without doubt her mother, a remarkable woman with a quizzical sense of humor, a colorful manner of speaking, and a long view that comes of witnessing much of the 20th century at first hand.
A list of highlights in this book would go on for pages; there's just so much to savor and enjoy. There's Mason's own unsophisticated childhood (barefoot summers, crushes on pop stars, rock and roll fandom), the making of the film "In Country," and the continuing transformation of the rural Kentucky environment from horse-and-buggy days to the invasion of agribusiness -- a huge processing plant has sprung up across the road from the family farm.
I recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Mason's fiction. It is rich with thoughtful and well-observed detail reaching back across three generations of family history.
While some readers of Mason's stories and novels may have been puzzled by the point of view in them (ironic? matter of fact? sentimental?), this wonderful memoir should do much to clear up that ambiguity. Here a reader is introduced to the world of day-to-day experience that these narratives have emerged from. And you can begin to see how the matter of fact, ironic, and sentimental blend into a perspective that is distinctly rural American. The strongest individual (who is surely the source of many of Mason's fictional characters) is without doubt her mother, a remarkable woman with a quizzical sense of humor, a colorful manner of speaking, and a long view that comes of witnessing much of the 20th century at first hand.
A list of highlights in this book would go on for pages; there's just so much to savor and enjoy. There's Mason's own unsophisticated childhood (barefoot summers, crushes on pop stars, rock and roll fandom), the making of the film "In Country," and the continuing transformation of the rural Kentucky environment from horse-and-buggy days to the invasion of agribusiness -- a huge processing plant has sprung up across the road from the family farm.
I recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Mason's fiction. It is rich with thoughtful and well-observed detail reaching back across three generations of family history.
October 20, 2022
I read "Feather Crowns" a long time ago, and was very impressed. This 1999 memoir manages to show her own childhood and also show a universal childhood. She was born in 1940 and grew up in rural Kentucky on a family farm.
November 1, 2023
I love a good memoir. The kind that go beyond “first I did this and then I did that” to plumb the depths of the big questions. I first started reading Bobbie Ann Mason decades ago in the pages of the New Yorker. I sailed through “Shiloh and Other Stories” and “In Country,” bought a used copy of “Lila and Spence” and then sort of forgot about her. An essay by George Saunders, an intro to a collection of her work released in 2018, brought me back to her thoughtful prose and profundity cloaked in humility. In this memoir and the stories told therein one sees glimpses of the writer Mason will one day become with her reverence for humble people of strong character who endure. People (she came from a long line of farmers) whose respect for the land and the limitations wrought by weather, seasonal cycles, and scarcity bring clarity and purpose to life. Excellent.
February 19, 2023
This book is one of my favorite memoirs. The author has an unique way of writing that pulled me in and engaged my emotions. My father was from Kentucky and a lot of what she wrote about was familiar. At times I felt that it was more than a 5 star book and then she would branch off into lofty speculation. I liked her imagination and yet I wonder if writing this memoir was her attempt to understand her family but often the speculation was a bit over the top. The authors insight was superb but the speculation watered it down somewhat for me, I have concluded that it is her personality. I still feel that the book is five stars for me. This sentence confounded me and made me laugh! "The two houses, emptied out, stand near the chicken tower like compliant whores." hmmmm what?!!!! A solid 5 stars.
April 8, 2016
Overall this was a really lovely memoir by a really good writer. It is a memoir of growing up in a small community in Kentucky and, somewhat unusual, there were no awful, damaging events in the author's upbringing (take that, Mary Karr and Frank McCourt). The main theme of the book is the dispelling of the notion that you can never go home again. Bobbie Ann Mason always had a free spirit and she was raised by earnest and loving parents who nurtured that spirit. She left for New York City when she was in her 20s and became the writer that she is. She was enamored and, at the same time, threatened by the lure of the big city. No matter how hard she tried, she could not shake her Southern country roots. She eventually marries and moves back to Kentucky to reconnect with her "homeland". She also explores the missing pieces from her ancestry, especially dealing with her maternal grandfather.
The height of this memoir, in my opinion, is the intense relationship between her and her mother. Although they chose different paths, they have undying love and support for each other. The author spells this out in lucid prose without becoming maudlin. I did tire a bit from the lack of drama in her life and probably would have appreciated this book more if it was a bit shorter.
The height of this memoir, in my opinion, is the intense relationship between her and her mother. Although they chose different paths, they have undying love and support for each other. The author spells this out in lucid prose without becoming maudlin. I did tire a bit from the lack of drama in her life and probably would have appreciated this book more if it was a bit shorter.
April 30, 2018
Bobbie Ann Mason grew up on a farm in Kentucky. The most salient feature of her childhood memories is how hard her parents worked. They were tied to the land. It absorbed all of their energy. The details of rural life were not glamorous for Bobbie Ann. She felt deprived of the variety of experience that one could have in a city. Despite leaving her homeplace, going off to college and becoming a writer she eventually returned to the Clear Springs area, not to farm, but to write. She delves into almost two centuries of her extended family history, researching each precious detail and imagining how life must have been at one time. Her prose makes it easy for a reader to get lost in that seemingly primitive rural world that has vanished long ago.
October 3, 2007
I loved this book. Western Kentucky isn't exactly an area that attracts a lot of attention from contemporary writers, but Bobby Ann Mason captures the voices and attitudes of this area perfectly. I first read it just a few years after I left Southern Indiana for the city (Philadelphia) and was feeling homesick for a certain kind of good-hearted hillbilly. The book is mostly about her grandmother, a stubborn and resourceful woman who held on through the Depression only to find herself marooned in the modern world.
March 8, 2023
This book by Bobbie Ann Mason was so descriptive—I was in awe the whole time reading it. Yes, it is very detailed and sometimes confusing with the lineage but I even loved that. She yearned, like I have, to know her ancestors. Fortunately, she got enough important details from her mother to find out about her “people”. I will never have that opportunity with my parents and grandparents all gone. My dad’s adoption was all hidden and with that my biological grandparents and further back, are not reachable.
I loved hearing her story—really her mom’s story. I especially loved the last scene of the book in the pond. I can imagine my grandmother doing something like that—then telling the tale later, once she had saved herself. There are no whiny women in this memoir. It reinforced what I have always thought—that women have so much more endurance and strength than men.
I came to love Bobbie’s imperfect and realistic family. I understand how she doesn’t totally fit in at cocktail parties. She is a lot like me—a deep thinker that understands what is important in life—relationships, nature, family, heredity—not trivial things most people talk and think about.
Growing up in Kentucky with great grandparents that were immigrants from Germany and with my dad’s adoption—a whole side of myself I don’t know about, I related to this memoir. No, I didn’t grow up in Clear Springs but I have very similar feelings going to places where my relatives grew up—houses that still stand and knowing my “people”.
I thank Bobbie Ann Mason for writing this wonderful book! ❤️
I loved hearing her story—really her mom’s story. I especially loved the last scene of the book in the pond. I can imagine my grandmother doing something like that—then telling the tale later, once she had saved herself. There are no whiny women in this memoir. It reinforced what I have always thought—that women have so much more endurance and strength than men.
I came to love Bobbie’s imperfect and realistic family. I understand how she doesn’t totally fit in at cocktail parties. She is a lot like me—a deep thinker that understands what is important in life—relationships, nature, family, heredity—not trivial things most people talk and think about.
Growing up in Kentucky with great grandparents that were immigrants from Germany and with my dad’s adoption—a whole side of myself I don’t know about, I related to this memoir. No, I didn’t grow up in Clear Springs but I have very similar feelings going to places where my relatives grew up—houses that still stand and knowing my “people”.
I thank Bobbie Ann Mason for writing this wonderful book! ❤️
June 13, 2025
If the only thing Bobbie Ann Mason ever did was to write In Country, it was enough to keep her in my short list of favorite authors evermore. There was a lot more to Bobbie than writing an emotional novel that was made into a movie. As much as she wanted get away from her family farm to see the world and continue her education, she was through and through a family person.
This memoir is not just about Bobbie growing up. It's about her whole family especially her mother. It was especially interesting as she started delving into her family background and solving some of the mysteries as to why her grandmother was so nervous or how her mother got by without her mother and father growing up.
The other thing that really struck me was the attitudes her deep seated southern family had. She said in her book that many times people were not able to understand their ways, but I could. Her father's thoughts about doctors, her seemingly nonchalant ways of moving on to the next dog and the next. The whole rural lifestyle is one that maybe many people can't understand and wouldn't want to live, but I do. More needs to be written like this before it disappears.
She has lived a very full life and took very good care of the family members that took care of her. Would have loved a photo section.
This memoir is not just about Bobbie growing up. It's about her whole family especially her mother. It was especially interesting as she started delving into her family background and solving some of the mysteries as to why her grandmother was so nervous or how her mother got by without her mother and father growing up.
The other thing that really struck me was the attitudes her deep seated southern family had. She said in her book that many times people were not able to understand their ways, but I could. Her father's thoughts about doctors, her seemingly nonchalant ways of moving on to the next dog and the next. The whole rural lifestyle is one that maybe many people can't understand and wouldn't want to live, but I do. More needs to be written like this before it disappears.
She has lived a very full life and took very good care of the family members that took care of her. Would have loved a photo section.
May 7, 2017
Has anyone mentioned "The Old Man and the Sea"? How about "The Old Woman and the Pond"?
Although published 20 years ago, the memoir adds to the current discussion focusing on red states and who the people are who live there. Why did I become who I am? Why did I make the choices that I've made? While no clear answers are given, an examination of the past presents us with a picture of the past and those who have influenced our choices.
I met Bobbie Ann Mason back in the mid 1980s at a small college campus in Pennsylvania while she was on a reading tour promoting her second book. We grew up in similar places, probably 100 miles apart. I know some of the places she mentions in her work. Her voice is true, and she has become one of my favorite writers.
Although published 20 years ago, the memoir adds to the current discussion focusing on red states and who the people are who live there. Why did I become who I am? Why did I make the choices that I've made? While no clear answers are given, an examination of the past presents us with a picture of the past and those who have influenced our choices.
I met Bobbie Ann Mason back in the mid 1980s at a small college campus in Pennsylvania while she was on a reading tour promoting her second book. We grew up in similar places, probably 100 miles apart. I know some of the places she mentions in her work. Her voice is true, and she has become one of my favorite writers.
January 15, 2024
I picked up this memoir since we're studying KY history and culture this semester and I wanted to immerse myself in KY authors. If you wanted to know about life in KY during the 1900's, I would recommend this book. Otherwise I would just pass it on by.
It as interesting to compare to Wendell Berry as there were themes of small town, complicated family relations, and the ole' family homestead that none of the children want.
First book of 2024!
It as interesting to compare to Wendell Berry as there were themes of small town, complicated family relations, and the ole' family homestead that none of the children want.
First book of 2024!
December 30, 2023
I do like a good memoir, and this is a good memoir. While I did not grow up on a farm, I am nonetheless a product of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, making many of her experiences and descriptions relatable, especially those from her childhood. While my adult years did not parallel hers, Bobbie Ann Mason knows how to tell a relatable tale that draws one in.
August 13, 2017
Wonderful!
A surprisingly engaging story! Once I got involved, I couldn't put this memoir down. So much of this reminded me of summers with my grandparents and those were welcoming and missed more than I knew. Highly recommended!!
A surprisingly engaging story! Once I got involved, I couldn't put this memoir down. So much of this reminded me of summers with my grandparents and those were welcoming and missed more than I knew. Highly recommended!!
March 5, 2018
Interesting but not compelling
I found the story line to be well drawn out and with good clarity of detail. The subject matter was quite ordinary without much excitement in movement.
Judith.
I found the story line to be well drawn out and with good clarity of detail. The subject matter was quite ordinary without much excitement in movement.
Judith.
March 1, 2023
I love this memoir with all my heart. Thank you Bobbie Ann Mason for bringing me home. Although I never lived in Kentucky, my ancestral roots are there and these are my people. You brought them to life on the page and healed my heart some. I love it when I discover a new author after my own heart.
November 3, 2020
Pulitzer nominated memoir by author Bobbie Ann Mason. Beautifully written.
October 22, 2023
Charming, but not holding my interest. Time to move on.
September 11, 2024
Meander and jumped around too much. Seems like it was written more for herself than a wanting audience.
Read
April 9, 2025Abandoned page 11. “Why would only rock music do?”
March 2, 2015
I think the only other thing I ever read by Bobbie Ann Mason is her short story "Shiloh." I am pretty sure I read the story while I was still in high school. I think it was in the thick anthology I won in a writing contest when I was in 10th or 11th grade. The story was about a relationship on the brink of falling apart, and it changed something inside of me, made me really feel for those two people, something that "adlut" fiction hadn't yet done for me very often.
So this year I'm on a memoir kick. I decided to read Clear Springs when I saw it listed on Bookmooch, based on the strength of "Shiloh."
This book is not just the story of Mason's life. It is the story of her mother's life as much as the story of Mason's own. It's also a lot the story of her paternal grandmother's life, and to a lesser extent, the story of her maternal grandmother's life too. (Her maternal grandmother died young, so there is less story to tell.) This book is about all of her family, really, her dad too and her grandpa and the people who came before them.
I liked the way Mason told her story, her family's story, almost like it was fiction. The characters are well-rounded, whole, good and bad all at once. If this were fiction, I'd say these "characters" are just like real people.
Mason had to do a lot of detective work to find out the stories of her ancestors. She comes from a long line of taciturn folks, so she had to do research in libraries and archives, as well as pump her mother for information, in order to get the details she so richly includes.
I wish Mason had included more information on race relations. Other than a couple of mentions (a nurse in the early 1940s telling little Bobbie Ann about a cute little "colored" baby in the nursery and a cousin of her father referring to someone by using a racial epithet), reading this book could lead one to believe there were hardly any African Americans living where she grew up. Maybe that's the case, but I find it hard to believe her family living in Kentucky did not have frequent dealings with people of color. Where her well-off ancestors not quite rich enough to own slaves? Were they against owning slaves? I would have found either possibility interesting to learn about.
I was also disappointed that Mason wrote very little about her adult life that was not related to her mother, father, and more distant ancestors. I guess she's saving those stories for another book. I will for sure read that book when I can get my hands on it.
So this year I'm on a memoir kick. I decided to read Clear Springs when I saw it listed on Bookmooch, based on the strength of "Shiloh."
This book is not just the story of Mason's life. It is the story of her mother's life as much as the story of Mason's own. It's also a lot the story of her paternal grandmother's life, and to a lesser extent, the story of her maternal grandmother's life too. (Her maternal grandmother died young, so there is less story to tell.) This book is about all of her family, really, her dad too and her grandpa and the people who came before them.
I liked the way Mason told her story, her family's story, almost like it was fiction. The characters are well-rounded, whole, good and bad all at once. If this were fiction, I'd say these "characters" are just like real people.
Mason had to do a lot of detective work to find out the stories of her ancestors. She comes from a long line of taciturn folks, so she had to do research in libraries and archives, as well as pump her mother for information, in order to get the details she so richly includes.
I wish Mason had included more information on race relations. Other than a couple of mentions (a nurse in the early 1940s telling little Bobbie Ann about a cute little "colored" baby in the nursery and a cousin of her father referring to someone by using a racial epithet), reading this book could lead one to believe there were hardly any African Americans living where she grew up. Maybe that's the case, but I find it hard to believe her family living in Kentucky did not have frequent dealings with people of color. Where her well-off ancestors not quite rich enough to own slaves? Were they against owning slaves? I would have found either possibility interesting to learn about.
I was also disappointed that Mason wrote very little about her adult life that was not related to her mother, father, and more distant ancestors. I guess she's saving those stories for another book. I will for sure read that book when I can get my hands on it.
October 7, 2019
3.5 stars. This is a re-read and stood up well to that. Really I might have given it the fourth star, if I hadn't already rated it three on first reading.
In many ways it reminded me of Claiming Ground by Laura Bell (see my review of that), though not as beautifully written and poetic. Both are pastorales, memoirs of a dying way of life, that may already not exist (Clear Springs was published in 1999). Bobbie Mason was born in rural western KY in 1940. She writes of farm life, where people grew most of their own food, harvested, canned, preserved, raised chickens and cows. Since I am trying in a small way to recreate some of that lifestyle, I understand that it isn't just idyllic. A lot of work and outcome of it very much dependent on the vagaries of Nature. I will have very little summer or fall crop this year due to extended record heat and drought (climate change).
Mason has some feminist sensibility about the roles of women and the oppressions. She writes about the second shift, before that was a common phrase-- how both men and women did hard physical labor all day, but then the menfolk came in and sat and smoked and drank and socialized, while the women just kept on working, cooking and washing up, tending children, sewing, packing lunches, often until midnight. She also shows good minds especially female ones, being wasted with no education and no freedom to think or read or write.
There isn't really any story line, action, drama, just a story of generations of family rooted in the same little patch of earth in a way that hardly happens any more, at least in the U.S.
In many ways it reminded me of Claiming Ground by Laura Bell (see my review of that), though not as beautifully written and poetic. Both are pastorales, memoirs of a dying way of life, that may already not exist (Clear Springs was published in 1999). Bobbie Mason was born in rural western KY in 1940. She writes of farm life, where people grew most of their own food, harvested, canned, preserved, raised chickens and cows. Since I am trying in a small way to recreate some of that lifestyle, I understand that it isn't just idyllic. A lot of work and outcome of it very much dependent on the vagaries of Nature. I will have very little summer or fall crop this year due to extended record heat and drought (climate change).
Mason has some feminist sensibility about the roles of women and the oppressions. She writes about the second shift, before that was a common phrase-- how both men and women did hard physical labor all day, but then the menfolk came in and sat and smoked and drank and socialized, while the women just kept on working, cooking and washing up, tending children, sewing, packing lunches, often until midnight. She also shows good minds especially female ones, being wasted with no education and no freedom to think or read or write.
There isn't really any story line, action, drama, just a story of generations of family rooted in the same little patch of earth in a way that hardly happens any more, at least in the U.S.
July 5, 2016
"My grandmother baked cookies, but she didn't believe in eating them fresh from the oven. She stored them in her cookie jar for a day or two before she would let me have any." These are the opening words in Bobbie Ann Mason's memoir, Clear Springs. And with those simple words, she gripped my attention and held it.
Bobbie Ann Mason grew up in rural Kentucky and she writes about herself and her family, especially her grandmother and mother. The tales felt real, about places and people I knew; although I grew up in the center of Los Angeles, far from farms or fields, the feelings and personalities of her characters were familiar and real. Mason tells about her early years on the family farm, her college years, her move to NYC, the making of a movie based on her novel In Country. Mason's life story contains no traumas, no drama, but is compelling nonetheless. The writing is lyrical and thoughtful, the descriptions rich and vivid.
Mason tells the story of her grandmother and of her mother, both living circumscribed lives limited by gender expectations, something Mason was determined to escape. It was interesting to me how compulsively Mason had to "fill in the blanks" in the family story, to imagine what went on in her ancestors' lives, to imagine how they felt and thought. I guess that focused imagination is one part of being a writer. And most certainly Bobbie Ann Mason is a writer of immense talent. Wonderful writing. Wonderful recreation of a time and place.
Bobbie Ann Mason grew up in rural Kentucky and she writes about herself and her family, especially her grandmother and mother. The tales felt real, about places and people I knew; although I grew up in the center of Los Angeles, far from farms or fields, the feelings and personalities of her characters were familiar and real. Mason tells about her early years on the family farm, her college years, her move to NYC, the making of a movie based on her novel In Country. Mason's life story contains no traumas, no drama, but is compelling nonetheless. The writing is lyrical and thoughtful, the descriptions rich and vivid.
Mason tells the story of her grandmother and of her mother, both living circumscribed lives limited by gender expectations, something Mason was determined to escape. It was interesting to me how compulsively Mason had to "fill in the blanks" in the family story, to imagine what went on in her ancestors' lives, to imagine how they felt and thought. I guess that focused imagination is one part of being a writer. And most certainly Bobbie Ann Mason is a writer of immense talent. Wonderful writing. Wonderful recreation of a time and place.
January 18, 2010
Mason is from Kentucky and writes about her community and family history in Clear Springs, KY which I think is wonderful and I imagine most interesting to her kith and kin rather than to the American public at large. How this book received a New York Times Notable book distinction escapes me. It seems to speak to a smaller audience. On a positive note, however, this book could serve as inspiration for the rest of us to ask the questions of our aunts, uncles, and parents and then sit down and really listen to the stories of their past. It seems this author had to persist awhile before her mother was willing to share some of the painful events of her past which then gave her valuable insight and a new appreciation for her mother.
June 5, 2013
I have to admit that I am a huge Bobbie Ann Mason fan. I didn't realize, however, when I picked up this book that it's a memoir and not fiction. The story is about three generations of her family growing up in Kentucky. It was a fascinating story about how times have changed and how rural life impacts your view of the world. The stories she tells going back to the turn of the 20th century are fascinating. The depictions are very vivid, including her own child and young adulthood.
It was a treat to step into the life of a favorite author.
It was a treat to step into the life of a favorite author.
December 26, 2016
I had no idea that this memoir was written by an acclaimed author of fiction, which was good, in a way, because I was continually impressed by the quality of the writing as well as the story being told (I can't enjoy one without the other!). This story made me feel sad more often than happy, but not in a bad way. Some lives look sad from another perspective or from another place in time. My grandmother would likely have written a similar memoir, yet I, thankfully, also often witnessed her happiness and joy -- as a kid lucky enough to live in an extended family, as Mason did.
June 20, 2007
Although fulfilling my 8th grade non-fiction reading, this book did not fulfill my expectations of a good story; probably due to the difference in the values of the author and me. Telling the story of a woman's life, this book goes through the stages of her life, but much to my dissapointment, skimmed through her teenage years, focusing mainly on her leaving her farm life and moving into the city to become someone important- something I feel quite the opposite about.
April 21, 2009
A wonderful book about Western Kentucky farm life in the 1940s and the girl who couldn't wait to grow up and move away, only to return later in her life. In addition to details about the author's life, we are also treated to the same details about her parents, grandparents and other ancestors who settled in the area in the 1800s.
After reading this book, I felt I had actually traveled down toward the Mayfield, Kentucky, farm and met that interesting family.
After reading this book, I felt I had actually traveled down toward the Mayfield, Kentucky, farm and met that interesting family.
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