“although i was born in brooklyn and raised amid the concrete and chaos of manhattan, i have been nourished from earliest childhood by the lyrical magic of southern fiction, southern folklore and southern ballads and those who have sung them and preserved them. reynolds price gave me rosacoke mustian, tennessee williams gave me blanche and stella and maggie the cat, truman capote gave me holly golightly -- each in her own way a southern woman of intriguing complexity.

and now comes the icing on the coconut cake, the sharp tang of homemade lemonade made with real lemons, the riotous, heartbreaking, brilliantly evocative "dear daisy," jerry marshall’s memoir of growing up in virginia’s piedmont with his grandma daisy.

i have seen jerry in performance at new york’s algonquin hotel (a fitting literary venue dating back to the historic round table). dressed in elaborate finery like a wayfaring minstrel of the past, he recited his letters to dear daisy in a molasses smooth voice that at first lulled us into a front porch summer languor only to jolt us upright with a piss-and-vinegar rage of a young man’s loss and ultimate redemption.

later when i read the"dear daisy," letters in manuscript, i realized that i could hear jerry’s voice rising up from the printed page, that his arrangements of words and choices of punctuation provide an added dimension of sound that few prose writers can achieve.

"dear daisy," makes me ache with laughter yet fills me with a wistful yearning for something i never had, the wisdom and candor of a no-shit grandma like daisy. thanks to jerry marshall, i not only have her but i can pay a sunday call on "dear daisy," whenever i feel the need.

jeannie sakol
novelist, biographer and humorist