Bobbie Ann Mason's genius only grows stronger and wiser and funnier with every new book, and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail is my absolute favorite so far. What an ear she has for the telling phrase, what an eye for the heartbreaking detail. These new stories are stunning.

Bobbie Ann Mason's genius only grows stronger and wiser and funnier with every new book, and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail is my absolute favorite so far. What an ear she has for the telling phrase, what an eye for the heartbreaking detail. These new stories are stunning.

You must be the greatest mother in the world, but you must also, simultaneously, withdraw from your children's lives. You don't want to be the major force in their whole lives. You need to do the job adequately and as best you can, and then provide them with independence from you. You have to give them enough so that they won't need you anymore.

You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.

Like most good looking women, she was never sure of her beauty, and had to keep checking on it, to make sure it was still there.

But the moods could be contagious. He didn't need one right now.

I read Butterfly’s Child in one day, totally hooked. It is a captivating novel of love, guilt, sin, justice—and how all these things are, in time, transformed surprisingly and inevitably.