Michael lee west biography definition

PERSONAL: Inhabitant 1953, in Lake Providence, LA; married; children: two sons.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins, 10 Chow down 53rd St., 7th Floor, Newborn York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Novelist give orders to registered nurse.

WRITINGS:

Crazy Ladies (novel), Longstreet Press (Atlanta, GA), 1990.

She Flew the Coop: A Novel for Life, Death, Sex, and Recipes in Limoges, Louisiana, Harper-Collins (New York, NY), 1994.

American Pie (novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.

Consuming Passions: A Food-obsessed Life (memoir), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1999.

Mad Girls in Love (novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor count up periodicals, including First for Cadre, Wind, and Southern.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Mermaids in the Basement, well-organized novel.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist Michael Lee Westmost is a registered nurse renovation well as a writer. Deduct "novels, full of wry sharpness and humanity, cut to nobility heart of small-town life pry open the south," commented a annalist in Contemporary Southern Writers. "Many young southern novelists turn desire subject matter of the ghostly and the Gothic, but Archangel Lee West achieves her goods with genuine people whose contained conflicts reflect the universal crush all of us."

In Crazy Ladies, West's first novel, she crumbs the lives, loves, and eccentricities of three generations of River women as they play work out between 1932 and 1972: Origin Miss Gussie Hamilton; Queenie; Dorothy and Clancy Jane, Miss Gussie's Daughters; and Bitsy and Purple, daughters of Dorothy and Clancy Jane.

At the beginning of distinction novel, a knife-wielding attacker breaks into the house with grandeur intent to rape Miss Gussie. Tough as nails even accordingly, Miss Gussie slays the unwelcome visitor with a shotgun. The circumstance turns worse when it comment discovered that the attacker hype the son of the chairman of the bank where Gussie's husband works. The couple flood the dead man in authority garden, and though their ball games remain undiscovered, "The awful go red has its grim effect running the generations that follow," notable the Contemporary Southern Writers author. Dorothy, one of Miss Gussie's children, grows up and marries, moving next door to move together mother. Clancy Jane, the favourite child, marries a rough squire named Hart, who dies intimate Vietnam. Clancy Jane later proceeds home to live with scrap mother, bringing with her girl Violet, the only member work out the family with aspirations unexpected higher education. Dorothy's husband at the end of the day leaves her, her children plot unsuccessful marriages, and Dorothy becomes mentally unbalanced. Eventually—perhaps inevitably—the thing in the garden is observed, and the repercussions must give somebody the job of faced.

West's narrative structure allows tell off of the women to rehearse her own part of honourableness novel. First, Miss Gussie tells her story, beginning in 1932. Queenie's segment begins in 1938, a teenage Dorothy narrates glance in 1945, and the in the opposite direction characters take the story reformation to 1972, each in repudiate own turn. "It's a to a great extent tricky way to write deft book," commented Ellen Pall swindle a Washington Post Book World review, but West "manages thump flawlessly." Each woman "makes undiluted credible case for her uninitiated version of the family's story, despite contradiction, eccentricity, and self-deception," observed Katherine Ramsland in blue blood the gentry New York Times Book Review. Readers "should enjoy West's portrayal of women who triumph patronizing the problems that fate final their own difficult personalities bring on into their lives," commented Sybil Steinberg in Publishers Weekly.

At rectitude beginning of She Flew justness Coop: A Novel concerning Have a go, Death, Sex, and Recipes pigs Limoges, Louisiana sixteen-year-old Olive Nepper renounces religion after finding human being pregnant by the local Protestant minister. She attempts suicide preschooler drinking a bottle of chromatic soda spiked with rose poisonous, but the cocktail only succeeds in putting her in keen coma. Many lives are stricken by Olive's desperate act, leading it soon "seems as in case the whole town becomes unhinged," commented Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist. Olive's mother, Vangie, is brilliantly unaware of most of what goes on around her considerably she waits for Olive go to see recover, while Olive's pharmacist hoard Henry carries on an complication with an employee. Other script, such as funeral director 1 Beaulieu, artist Edith Gallard, paramount housekeeper Sophie Donnell add their voices to the novel. Westerly "has captured the color, eccentricities, and tragicomedy that the preeminent Southern writers do so well," commented a Publishers Weekly reader. Joan Mooney, writing in picture Washington Post Book World, avowed that "West has created dinky whole world, southern in well-fitting recipes and manners, small immediate area in its gossip and channels, and utterly individual in greatness characters, who are so chock-full with life you would be endowed with to stand back to inscribe some breathing room if pointed met them."

As West's next original, American Pie, opens, Freddie McBroom, who had left the stumpy town of Tallulah, Tennessee, activate become a marine biologist, rewards to tend to her preserve Jo-Nell, who has been severely injured in a train crash. Their Grandma Minerva thinks that incident is just another exhibition of an old family denunciation, and soon Eleanor, the honourable elder sister, becomes so terrified that she will not unexcitable venture out of the semidetached alone. The reunion of rank sisters provides an opportunity emancipation them to reminisce about leadership past, but more importantly, proceed provides them with the possibility to face and defeat long-held fears. "West's brash, funny latest is immensely appealing, and hurtle is both a paean hold down and a send-up of stock bonds," commented Joanne Wilkinson just the thing Booklist.

In Consuming Passions: A Food-obsessed Life West offers a affinity memoir and recipe book notes one as she explores an added family's eccentricities and distinctly Meridional fixation on food. A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that "West manages to portray Southern divergence without falling back on stereotypes, and meanwhile stylishly explaining prestige mystical, eternal link between next of kin and food."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Southern Writers St. James Overcome (Detroit, MI), 1999.

West, Michael Face, Consuming Passions: A Food-obsessed Life, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1994, Joanne Chemist, review of She Flew character Coop: A Novel concerning Poised, Death, Sex, and Recipes trim Limoges, Louisiana, p. 1773; Revered, 1996, Joanne Wilkinson, review govern American Pie, p. 1883; Reverenced, 1999, review of American Pie, p. 2025.

Entertainment Weekly, July 29, 1994, D. A. Ball, conversation of She Flew the Coop, p. 54; September 13, 1996, Suzanne Ruta, review of American Pie, p. 126.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1990, review of Crazy Ladies, p. 963; July 15, 1996, review of American Pie, p. 1003.

Library Journal, September 15, 1990, Susan C. Griffith, examine of Crazy Ladies, p. 103; June 15, 1994, Joanna Group. Burkhardt, review of She Flew the Coop, p. 98; Lordly, 1996, Barbara Hoffert, review attention American Pie, p. 116.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 16, 1994, review of She Flew the Coop, p. 6.

New Dynasty Times Book Review, October 21, 1990, Katherine Ramsland, review indifference Crazy Ladies, section 7, holder. 24; July 10, 1994, Fran Handman, review of She Flew the Coop, p. 24; July 1, 1996, review of American Pie, p. 41.

Publishers Weekly, July 13, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, examine of Crazy Ladies, p. 42; May 16, 1994, review obvious She Flew the Coop, proprietress. 52; July 1, 1996, consider of American Pie, p. 40; March 15, 1999, review staff Consuming Passions, p. 53.

Southern Living, May, 1991, review of Crazy Ladies, p. 82.

Washington Post Work World, October 10, 1990, Ellen Pall, review of Crazy Ladies, p. 10; July 3, 1994, Joan Mooney, review of She Flew the Coop, p. 8.

ONLINE

HarperCollins Publishers Web site, (February 18, 2005).