The American genius for language lies in understatement...Earley has the courage to return to artistic first principals: clarity, balance, ease. (The New York Times Book Review)
Tony Earley's view of the world is from the edge, at the cusp. Which is what this collection of personal essays is about - about how he stands with one foot in the rural mountains of his birth and upbringing and the other in the Brady Bunch's split-level.
Born thirty-nine years ago, Earley was too late to be a Baby Boomer, too soon to be a Gen Xer. He grew up in the North Carolina mountains but says, "I go around telling anyone who will listen that I am from the country, but deep down I know it's a lie. I grew up on Gilligan's Island, in Mayberry, I'm not sure where."
In a prose style that is deceptively simple (E. B. White comes to mind), Earley confronts the big things - death, civilization, family, his own clinical depression - with wit and grace, without looking away or smirking. He writes about how he's neither an adherent to the fundamentalism of his boyhood nor an unbeliever, and about how hard it is to find your place in the world without letting go of your authenticity.
Clearly having lost patience with irony, Tony Earley is on a journey from faith, through disbelief, and into a new faith.and a new family. And he is a writer so good at his craft that you don't read his words so much as inhale them. His first book of nonfiction is one of those unexpected classics in which a great writer rips open his heart and takes the reader inside for a no-holds-barred tour.
