The Tilted World Quotes

“Maybe she'd needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“He sings, “I’m in Mississippi, with mud all in my shoes / My girl in Louisiana with those high water blues.” Later he says, “Listen here, you men, / one more thing I’d like to say / Ain’t no womens out here, for they all got washed away.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“He was the kind of man who grew better looking the longer you knew him. Whereas Jesse began to tarnish the moment you took him off the shelf.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“The beads of his words strung with too much silence between them.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Reading Group Guide  1.   The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage?  2.   How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today?  3.   The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story?  4.   The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages?  5.   Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor?  6.   At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book?  7.   Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other?  8.   Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done?  9.   When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Louisiana 1927”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Bob Dylan’s 2001 tribute to Charlie Patton.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Back water done rose at Sumner,” sings Patton, “drove poor Charlie down, down the line.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“High Water Everywhere” by Charlie Patton. If you have a hard time making out the lyrics, you’re not alone—even Son House (who, along with Howlin’ Wolf, was influenced by Patton)”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Mississippi Heavy Water Blues”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“The “back waters” she sings of are old riverbeds that were deliberately flooded to take pressure off the main channel’s levees. “Back water blues done call me to pack my things and go,”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Back Water Blues” by Bessie Smith. This is the one most closely associated with the 1927 flood,”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Blind Pig Blues”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Rosie,” also called “Be My Woman, Girl (I’ll Be Your Man)” and “Early in the Morning”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie. Memphis Minnie wrote this with her husband, Kansas Joe McCoy; it was later covered by Led Zepplin.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Down Hearted Blues,” by Bessie Smith. This is the song Ingersoll is singing to the baby”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“This is clearly not the most expedient route—we learned that writing a collaborative novel doesn’t amount to doing half the work, but rather, doing twice the work—but it was a wild new kind of work, a work that takes the other’s half, and raises it by half. This felt intimate—showing”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“turn the story into a novel, and we agreed because the characters we’d created for that short story were still hanging around our brains. They had more to say.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“My husband and I collaborated on a novel and we didn’t fight. We fought more while “collaborating” on the assembly of an IKEA baby crib (that crib almost did require marriage counseling).”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“the writing process behind The Tilted World.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“he loved about people—trouble brought out their grit, their creativity.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Baseball,” he said. “Babe Ruth.” Dixie Clay saw now that the boy wore a satchel honeycombed with rolled newspapers. The world was still going on, was it.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Maybe she’d needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream. Maybe only then could a man like Ingersoll make sense.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“She had been told of a thing that sounded like a locomotive. And that thing was a flood.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“My baby. My baby. She loved to call him Willy, but others could also call him Willy. Only she could say, My baby. But as much as he was her baby then, he was more so now, after the vigil on her knees, after the curses and after the prayers, after the weeping and after the begging, after going into the deepest blackest place.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“The gun was like his guitar: a thing that had power because of the hole in the middle. Maybe like Ingersoll, too, for that matter.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“three weeks later she was breech-birth dead. Dixie Clay confided in her father that she’d caused them, these deaths her punishment, but her father was emphatic, one hand on each of her cheeks, No, no. It had nothing to do with her. And he made her promise not to think that the world organized itself to spite her or reward her,”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn’t be coming back to,”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“That’s what Jesse had never understood: she didn’t even want to. She’d known, too, for the first time, that her mother had been lucky to die in childbirth, still one with the baby dying within her.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“But maybe, she told herself, the squirrels had felt themselves falling and leaped to safety. The key was to know when you were falling.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World