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A Memoir
Counterpoint Press
March 2007
On Sale: March 12, 2007
320 pages ISBN: 1582433593 EAN: 9781582433592 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
The story of one girl's heroic struggle to overcome the
lower-middle class obstacles that stood between her and the
world she knew she could call her oyster, Dark at the Roots
limns the absurdities of growing up funny in the deep south. When Sarah Thyre was barely out of diapers, her father
started referring to her as the "family liar," though no
particular incident had provoked this designation. Undaunted
by her label, Sarah started referring to herself as Renee
and creating scenarios that would help her assimilate up
from her chaotic family into a higher social calling. But
even as she was clipping an alligator logo off of one shirt
to sew onto another, her place in the middle - of her
family, her neighborhood, her school, her country - kept
humbling her back to just plain Sarah. In Dark at the Roots, Sarah is catapulted from the relative
safety of a nuclear family, through the years of her mother
going it alone with five mouths to feed with a steady diet
of pasta and fried eggs, to the teenage years where wearing
a school uniform was a godsend to a girl unable to afford
the latest fashions ... if only she would have admitted it.
In this telling, Sarah's inimitable sense of humor and
resolve are both honed to a fine, sharp point. And though it
is occasionally young Sarah who is skewered, she manages to
turn her pain into punch lines, leaving little room for
doubt that this is how a true humorist is built. Whether it is a scene where small Sarah accidentally goes
"poddy" in the garage during a game of hide-and-seek or
medium-sized Sarah survives a fishing trip with her volatile
father, or full-sized Sarah wrestles with a tooth she calls
"Uncle Wiggly" and all he represents, grown-up Sarah tells
her story with self-effacing sincerity and a seemingly
invincible sense of humor. With its spare, razor-sharp prose
and precision timing, Dark at the Roots emerges as not just
a humorous memoir, but a powerful, universal testament to
surviving one's rearing and living to laugh in the face of
it all.
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