My Own Alphabet

Stories & essays by Bobbie Louise Hawkins

August 1, 1989 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 144 pages • 978-0-918273-52-9

The letters of the alphabet are the points of departure for Hawkins’s explorations of adulthood.

In a sensitive tribute to the dominating learning experience of our childhood, My Own Alphabet uses each letter of the alphabet to mark Hawkins’s personal vision of what makes the world go round: A is for Attitude and Aging; D is for Death & Dying and Domestic Nirvana; H is for Heartbreak. Reminiscent of Russell Baker’s stories of the South, these full-bellied essays, anecdotes, theatrical monologues, and stories overflow in a cornucopia of rich revelations, experiences, and places, that thoroughly entertain the reader in a witty, provocative, and poignant story-telling style.

Reviews

“If more writers were writing like Bobbie Louise Hawkins—economically and truly about the only human things that interest us in prose: the past, the family, love, hate, duty, forgiveness—then maybe a few more thousand Americans would be reading narrative fiction and nourishing themselves on the oldest of all safe and enduring pleasures: new and fun and consolation.” —Reynolds Price