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Through the Groves: A Memoir
A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father’s family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. “Look now,” her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. “It will all be gone.” But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.
Here, Hull captures it all—the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women.
Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who’s ever left home to cut a path of their own.
Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father’s family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. “Look now,” her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. “It will all be gone.” But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.
Here, Hull captures it all—the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women.
Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who’s ever left home to cut a path of their own.
6 pages, Audible Audio
First published June 20, 2023
75 people are currently reading
6606 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 193 reviews
July 17, 2023
I have to admit that the style of writing by Anne Hull in her memoir “Through the Grooves “ was just about perfect for me. At times funny, there was an underlying theme of sadness and yet it was voiced with such honesty that it drew me in page-by-page. I was quite saddened to reach the end because I wanted to know more and I wanted her friendship most of all. A rather decent depiction of life through the lens of remembering.
July 10, 2023
“Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It’s bought, sold, paved over, and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father’s windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.”
July 2, 2023
The obvious players are here: orange groves, alligators, mosquitoes, lovebugs, oppressive humidity. But the Strawberry Festival, Ruskin tomatoes, gyp stacks, Beall’s, Bartow and Frostproof? Oh, my West-Central Floridian heart. Hull beautifully contrasts what’s bright and beautiful about the Sunshine State with its darker, damaged sides, while also exploring that same dichotomy in the people closest to her as she comes of age. Thoroughly enjoyed this and look forward to more from Anne Hull.
March 8, 2023
I loved this book! I found it difficult to put down. Anne Hull is an amazing writer. The reader is immediately transmitted to 1960s central Florida- to a place known as The Ridge. Life surrounds the orange groves that cover that part of the state. Her father, a former pesticide salesman, now in the orange juice business, takes Anne with him on his route. (This was her teacher-mother's idea, in order to make sure her dad didn't wind up drinking or in places he should not have been.)
We meet Hull's family in all their eccentric glory. Her father grew up on The Ridge in a family of orange growers. Her mother had come from up north with her own mother- a woman who spoke in a foreign accent although she was American. There is also her easy-going brother Dwight, whose name the family decides to change to Jim later in the story.
As her coming-of-age story unwinds, Hull takes us back to the 1960s and early 1970s: The Jackson Five, bell bottoms, shopping malls, Tiger Beat Magazine. Her family often struggled financially as they moved around central Florida following her mother's teaching jobs and her father's life in the Groves.
As Hull moves through her teen years, she begins to come to terms with her homosexuality, eventually realizing that she would eventually have to leave the Groves in order to live her life as she chose.
This is a moving memoir that took me back to my own years in the south in the 1970s. I highly recommend it.
Read this book if...
...you love biographies and memoirs
...you love stories from the southern states
...you enjoy coming-of-age stories
... you enjoy stories about family
We meet Hull's family in all their eccentric glory. Her father grew up on The Ridge in a family of orange growers. Her mother had come from up north with her own mother- a woman who spoke in a foreign accent although she was American. There is also her easy-going brother Dwight, whose name the family decides to change to Jim later in the story.
As her coming-of-age story unwinds, Hull takes us back to the 1960s and early 1970s: The Jackson Five, bell bottoms, shopping malls, Tiger Beat Magazine. Her family often struggled financially as they moved around central Florida following her mother's teaching jobs and her father's life in the Groves.
As Hull moves through her teen years, she begins to come to terms with her homosexuality, eventually realizing that she would eventually have to leave the Groves in order to live her life as she chose.
This is a moving memoir that took me back to my own years in the south in the 1970s. I highly recommend it.
Read this book if...
...you love biographies and memoirs
...you love stories from the southern states
...you enjoy coming-of-age stories
... you enjoy stories about family
May 28, 2023
DNF. Very heavy on the descriptions, light on the plot. Didn't keep my attention.
July 25, 2023
If you think everyone has a story worth publishing then you might like this dull, uninteresting memoir. Otherwise, it's not worth the paper it is printed on and a Henry Holt editor should be fired for putting out something without point or a decent story.
Hull slowly walks you through her snooze-worthy childhood with a dad that takes her on trips to the central Florida orange fields that he works. When he disappears to alcohol rehab her mom gets a divorce and moves the author and her brother to a few other Florida homes before marrying a real jerk that is one hundred times worse than her dad. That's it. Yawn.
Whole years are skipped, the ending is rushed to skip through Hull's career, which is so inconsequential you'll wonder how she got hired as a newswriter. You might expect some important points about southern racism or alcoholism or divorce or maybe even how Disney took over the orange groves. Or at least something about the writer's lesbianism. But no, there is nothing beyond simplistic boring information given in a monotonous way.
I have lived in Florida and walked the streets Hull mentions, including Sebring, Bartow, Lakeland, Plant City, and St. Petersburg. They are filled with life and charm, yet none of that comes through here. Instead we get mentions of what TV shows Hull is watching, how she somehow can afford to buy Teen Beat when the family has no money for basics, and how virtually every occasion is overwhelmed by oppressive Florida heat.
Hull may have a decent book in her but this isn't it, and if she was published because of her ties to the LGBTQ community then this actually hurts the cause since it contributes nothing to an understanding of gender history. Just as not every orange on a tree is worthy consuming, not everyone has a story in them worth publishing.
Hull slowly walks you through her snooze-worthy childhood with a dad that takes her on trips to the central Florida orange fields that he works. When he disappears to alcohol rehab her mom gets a divorce and moves the author and her brother to a few other Florida homes before marrying a real jerk that is one hundred times worse than her dad. That's it. Yawn.
Whole years are skipped, the ending is rushed to skip through Hull's career, which is so inconsequential you'll wonder how she got hired as a newswriter. You might expect some important points about southern racism or alcoholism or divorce or maybe even how Disney took over the orange groves. Or at least something about the writer's lesbianism. But no, there is nothing beyond simplistic boring information given in a monotonous way.
I have lived in Florida and walked the streets Hull mentions, including Sebring, Bartow, Lakeland, Plant City, and St. Petersburg. They are filled with life and charm, yet none of that comes through here. Instead we get mentions of what TV shows Hull is watching, how she somehow can afford to buy Teen Beat when the family has no money for basics, and how virtually every occasion is overwhelmed by oppressive Florida heat.
Hull may have a decent book in her but this isn't it, and if she was published because of her ties to the LGBTQ community then this actually hurts the cause since it contributes nothing to an understanding of gender history. Just as not every orange on a tree is worthy consuming, not everyone has a story in them worth publishing.
August 14, 2024
Meh. I was super excited to read it because I love autobiography and it promised to be about growing up in Florida as it changed from orange groves to the land of Disney, but it was very blah. A bit of childhood family dysfunction, a bit of LGBT issues, but no real big theme or purpose or meaning behind it like I wanted. I left feeling very underwhelmed by the impact. Even my husband was like, "That's it?" (He listened to most of it with me).
July 6, 2023
Good writing, but felt rushed and not as in-depth as I would have liked.
In any case—this book had me at Central Florida. (Well, apparently Polk County, but who is keeping track other than me?)
Gators. Mosquitos. DDT sprayed everywhere. Orange groves.
Central Florida in the 1960s–70s.
In any case—this book had me at Central Florida. (Well, apparently Polk County, but who is keeping track other than me?)
Gators. Mosquitos. DDT sprayed everywhere. Orange groves.
Central Florida in the 1960s–70s.
July 23, 2023
Hull’s vivid childhood reminiscences from citrus country unearthed some of my own forgotten memories of being a kid (getting shamed by my grandma for going shirtless like my brothers, being told to reach over and steer the truck when my dad needed to eat or had to jot down an idea while pulling a trailer down the highway.) Within Hull’s stories of bumping along in her dad’s truck and navigating family and school her (and my) childhood feelings of freedom and power, but also helplessness and fear were clear. Short and interesting read, I wish there was just a bit more continuity or closure between some of the memories and I would have been interested to follow her life further into adulthood.
June 21, 2023
4 stars
A fascinating & charming memoir about the writer’s girlhood in central Florida in the 60’s & 70’s. I enjoyed her many stories, especially the ones about her maternal grandmother.
[What I liked:]
•Anne & her family are interesting people. I was emotionally invested from the beginning, hoping life would work out for Anne, that she would find happiness & the freedom to be herself. I also was rooting for her father, who struggled with alcoholism but wrote her the most touching letters while they were separated.
•Anne’s maternal grandmother is absolutely delightful! I loved all of the parts that involved her. She seemed to really enjoy life & just be an all around cool lady.
•Reading about the orange industry—the trees, the fruits pickers, the hazardous pesticides, Aunt Dot’s fruit stand, etc.—was fascinating. You really get a feel for the particular time & place from Anne’s descriptions.
[What I didn’t like as much:]
•Some of the chapters have slightly abrupt endings. The upside is that this keeps the pacing from dragging, but it also left me feeling a bit disoriented over a few of the transitions between chapters.
•About 80% of the book covers Anne’s life from age 6 to age 13. The remainder is about her adolescence, discovering her sexuality, her career, her relationship with her parents as an adult, & her parents’ deaths—it just felt like a lot crammed in at the end. Since I enjoyed the first part of the book so much, I would’ve liked to hear more about her adolescent & adult years.
CW: sexism, racism, substance abuse, homophobia
[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]
A fascinating & charming memoir about the writer’s girlhood in central Florida in the 60’s & 70’s. I enjoyed her many stories, especially the ones about her maternal grandmother.
[What I liked:]
•Anne & her family are interesting people. I was emotionally invested from the beginning, hoping life would work out for Anne, that she would find happiness & the freedom to be herself. I also was rooting for her father, who struggled with alcoholism but wrote her the most touching letters while they were separated.
•Anne’s maternal grandmother is absolutely delightful! I loved all of the parts that involved her. She seemed to really enjoy life & just be an all around cool lady.
•Reading about the orange industry—the trees, the fruits pickers, the hazardous pesticides, Aunt Dot’s fruit stand, etc.—was fascinating. You really get a feel for the particular time & place from Anne’s descriptions.
[What I didn’t like as much:]
•Some of the chapters have slightly abrupt endings. The upside is that this keeps the pacing from dragging, but it also left me feeling a bit disoriented over a few of the transitions between chapters.
•About 80% of the book covers Anne’s life from age 6 to age 13. The remainder is about her adolescence, discovering her sexuality, her career, her relationship with her parents as an adult, & her parents’ deaths—it just felt like a lot crammed in at the end. Since I enjoyed the first part of the book so much, I would’ve liked to hear more about her adolescent & adult years.
CW: sexism, racism, substance abuse, homophobia
[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]
August 1, 2024
My daughters are native Floridians, and my husband and I lived in Pinellas County for 20 years — during the St. Petersburg Times’ halcyon days of talented young writers. Anne Hull was one of them. The Times also supported a strong scholastic journalism program in the county during this time, and as the newspaper adviser at both East Lake HS and then Countryside HS, I had the pleasure of hearing Anne Hull speak several times. In her memoir Through the Groves (which comes up as Grooves in my auto text, ha ha), Hull takes the reader on a journey through her past into the heart of old Florida. Using gorgeous sensory imagery, Hull tells her story with both innocence and wisdom, allowing the reader to ride in a humid night to get ice cream, smell the sweetness of orange blossoms, and feel the water move as a gator makes it way through. This book is for everyone as it shows how the different voices of those in our life make us who we are. It also presents a Florida that shrinks more each year. Highly highly recommend.
June 30, 2023
I enjoyed hearing about what it was like in Florida in the 60's and 70's. I love memoirs but this one didn't exactly grabbed me. 2.5 stars
August 19, 2023
3.5
CW:
CW:
July 24, 2024
Skip it. This is the second memoir I've encountered recently that features some decent storytelling, but I couldn't help but keep asking myself, "why?". Like, what is the point? What does the author want me to take away from this story? Or is it purely an exercise in narcissism? On top of it all, I found myself getting easily distracted while listening to this. It also really frustrated me that the author spent hours and hours going over the first 10 years of her life, to then fly through at least the next 40 in a fraction of the time. I'm disappointed.
September 26, 2023
For any born and raised Floridian, you can taste and smell the scenes Anne Hull pulls together. Her excellent writing and very Florida upbringing make for a lovely and concise memoir. It makes me yearn for the Florida of my own youth, before knowing the politics and seeing the orange groves and mangroves disappear.
The last few chapters felt a bit rushed, but overall it was a good pace with brilliant pieces of writing and imagery throughout. One of my favorite descriptions:
“Here cement block houses were painted in Necco Wafer colors. Pale pink and seafoam green and chalky yellow, all with white barrel tile roofs that looked like cake frosting against the blue sky.”
This one opening scene about going home after being away for so long really hit me in the gut:
“Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It's bought, sold, paved over, and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father's windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.”
And as someone who lived in newsrooms and wrote for the crime and court beats for nearly a decade, this scene made me laugh out loud in relatability.
“News reporters poured into town to cover the story. A fock of them took over the lunch counter at Gilbert Drugs, and one day Dad and I went to look at them. Sports coats and camera bags were strewn everywhere, so nobody else had room to sit. They spoke in loud voices and did not say "thank you' when the waitress topped off their coffee. One guy put his cigarette out in his grilled cheese! They seemed focused on something so important that nothing else mattered.”
The last few chapters felt a bit rushed, but overall it was a good pace with brilliant pieces of writing and imagery throughout. One of my favorite descriptions:
“Here cement block houses were painted in Necco Wafer colors. Pale pink and seafoam green and chalky yellow, all with white barrel tile roofs that looked like cake frosting against the blue sky.”
This one opening scene about going home after being away for so long really hit me in the gut:
“Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It's bought, sold, paved over, and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father's windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.”
And as someone who lived in newsrooms and wrote for the crime and court beats for nearly a decade, this scene made me laugh out loud in relatability.
“News reporters poured into town to cover the story. A fock of them took over the lunch counter at Gilbert Drugs, and one day Dad and I went to look at them. Sports coats and camera bags were strewn everywhere, so nobody else had room to sit. They spoke in loud voices and did not say "thank you' when the waitress topped off their coffee. One guy put his cigarette out in his grilled cheese! They seemed focused on something so important that nothing else mattered.”
November 18, 2023
I felt sorry for everyone.
June 3, 2023
Thank you NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the chance to listen to this early release of Anne Hull's memoir, Through the Groves.
In this memoir, Anne recounts memories of growing up in the South in the 60s and 70s. It's a coming-of-age story, where Anne realizes her sexuality and how being gay doesn't bode well in the South.
My favorite parts were listening to her memories of St. Petersburg and central Florida, as my family and I are frequent visitors to Tampa and St. Pete.
I enjoyed hearing Anne's story and am grateful for the chance to listen.
In this memoir, Anne recounts memories of growing up in the South in the 60s and 70s. It's a coming-of-age story, where Anne realizes her sexuality and how being gay doesn't bode well in the South.
My favorite parts were listening to her memories of St. Petersburg and central Florida, as my family and I are frequent visitors to Tampa and St. Pete.
I enjoyed hearing Anne's story and am grateful for the chance to listen.
December 21, 2023
This reads like a Judy Blume book: it's funny, but darker. Very enjoyable read that I couldn't put it down. The only negatives were that the pacing seemed a little off at times: the transition in jumping from childhood to adulthood seemed a little sudden. And I wished the author had included a little more history of old Florida, but maybe it was meant to be more of a memoir and less of a historical account. But really glad I picked this one up!
March 12, 2025
This was a joy to read! I love the details of her childhood observations and emotions and the descriptions of her family members. The story is really well paced and the tone is serious but light. She does such a good job with setting place and time too, picking all the right details to transport you there. Highly recommended read!
May 24, 2024
I enjoyed this memoir. I really liked Hull’s writing style, I often felt like I was there with her. Her life story is quite interesting and I really think I enjoyed it that much more as an audiobook, because she has a great voice for narration.
Read
July 25, 2024This just didn't hold my interest for some reason. I'm not entirely sure if it was the writing or just my mood/distractedness, so I'm not going to rate. It's possible it was a timing thing. Dnf a bit past 50%.
September 20, 2023
Adult
Nonfiction
Memoir
Set in Central Florida
LGBTQIA+
Nonfiction
Memoir
Set in Central Florida
LGBTQIA+
May 13, 2024
A truthful account of growing up around the central FL citrus grove area before her parents divorced and then her life in St.Pete, sometimes funny and somewhat sad too.
July 11, 2024
Very enjoyable to learn a bit about Florida’s recent past from a writer who grew up among orange groves.
May 2, 2025
Beautiful writing about a young lesbian coming of age amongst the groves of Oranges in Florida in a broken family. I wished the story were longer and the lesbian parts were more fleshed out, but that’s just one lesbian’s opinion
February 28, 2024
I was growing up in Indiana at a just slightly earlier time period than the author was growing up in Florida so I can very much relate to the stories she was telling especially since her parents were also teachers as were mine.
staying-away
November 16, 2025-Disclaimer: I won this book for free through Goodreads giveaways in exchange for an honest review.-
This is one of those books that a teacher would add to the unit that would make you question if you even want to graduate. So very boring. Very light in queer aspects, considering it's marketed as an LGBT book. The cover is interesting. Altogether, the memoir is not for me.
This is one of those books that a teacher would add to the unit that would make you question if you even want to graduate. So very boring. Very light in queer aspects, considering it's marketed as an LGBT book. The cover is interesting. Altogether, the memoir is not for me.
December 22, 2023
It's a memoir ... unique life story, as everybody's is, told honestly. But it's also a yearbook of sorts, an era in a part of Florida that few of us had a chance to know. Anne gifted me with so many old memories, and I thank her for that.
September 9, 2023
How oranges influenced the making of an award-winning journalist (Central Florida, also Gulf Coast; 1964 to 1983): What does the melancholy voice of Through the Groves tell us about the childhood and coming-of-age underpinnings that influenced the making of a celebrated journalist?
Anne Hull’s memoir of memories goes as far back to when she was three years old, to her early twenties. What do the events she recalls tell us about Hull?
An absorbing question knowing she’s the recipient of prestigious journalism awards that recognize Courage in Journalism (Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award), and the advancement of Human Rights (RFK Journalism Grand Prize Award).
Aware of these distinctions, you may find yourself looking for the emergence of skills and characteristics you imagine an acclaimed journalist might possess. That’s what makes reading this memoir different than others who also grew up impoverished, in an unstable home, in an oppressive place – in Hull’s case, undeveloped, “desolate” Central Florida in the 60s before Disney broke ground. Her father, son of citrus-growers, once told his six-year-old daughter that where they lived “was no place for a child, though Disney was betting otherwise.”
That town was Sebring, an area below “four thousand square miles of rural lands and unmarked roads” referred to as the Ridge. Back then, having the “heaviest concentration of citrus groves in the world.” Lurking under canopies of beautiful oak trees with “mossy beards” was a world not fit for a child. So why isolate and coop up a young girl in the blazing, humid summers inside a truck without air-conditioning and a windshield coated with “pesticide dust”? Why did her mother Victoria insist she accompany him? Driving through, checking on the orange groves he was in charge of for HP Hood milk company’s citrus subsidiary, now gone. “Almost nothing in Florida stays the same way,” Hull reflects, capturing some things that haven’t changed.
Her early memories etch a sense of outsiderhood: formidable “aloneness” and injustice a young girl perceptively picked up on and figured out. One involved her father’s right-hand man who supervised a hard-laboring crew of fruit pickers, Booker Sanders. Yes, his name evokes Bernie Sanders, senior Senator from Vermont, who’d have fought for Booker for Mayor of Sebring since he was by far the more qualified candidate but not happening in this white man’s world. Racism is alive and well, rearing its ugly head in another episode of a black man served at a lunch counter after segregation ended yet still treated like a dog. Is it any wonder, then, that Hull grew up to report on stories of racism, isolation, poverty over the twenty years she worked for The Washington Post?
The memoir makes you think of other people too. Like the often-quoted, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, who penned, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Hull’s childhood was wild in the emotionally unsettling, uprooted sense, and geographically playing in “spooky” cypress swamps teaming with alligators, mosquitoes, and chemicals. Her father sold pesticides for ORTHO, the chemical company. Can you hear Rachel Carson screaming? Once he was promoted to managing orange groves, the climate determined his family’s livelihood. Drought and cold weather became significant factors in his emotional distress and alcoholism.
Hull couldn’t have answered Oliver’s poetic question during the years she looks back on. Instead, she chooses issues she grew up in, around, and observed. Including culture wars between two parents whose values, aims, and worldliness were polar opposites, and a culture’s deep-seated religious faith and conservatism that didn’t allow her to freely express herself. A bright spot, more like a spotlight, was her maternal grandmother, Olive or Damie. A bohemian, “an ethereal flower,” she relocated to St. Petersburg from Brooklyn when she became widowed. Her Gulf Coast home was cluttered with “tribal masks, hookah pipes, Chinese scrolls, Bombay wicker fans” that drove her mother crazy when they lived with her, but the guitar-playing, Beatles and Carly Simon fan Damie let Hull be who she wanted to be.
On September 27, 2004, Hull wrote an article for the Post titled “A Slow Journey from Isolation,” in which she speaks of her “coming out” as a journey. Hull chose to play with toy soldiers over dolls. Again, keenly aware early on, seeing herself as a “tomboy” preferring to play with boys, fishing in the plentiful lakes, running around in pants not dresses. Her mother and paternal grandmother Gigi did what they could to direct her to more feminine things. Not that the two saw eye- to-eye all the time, with Gigi a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She lived in a town called Hopewell. An ironic name for a place that felt hopeless.
In fourth grade, Hull did find two kindred girlfriends. She recognized the threesome as outcasts. One a black girl, the other a girl who liked and treated her black classmate swell. Housed in a brand-new school named Stonewall Jackson Elementary, governed by a school board that fought against integration for eight years, how did this affect Hull’s sensitivities?
The budding journalist, though, stays balanced, showing a generous side of Gigi and, more profoundly, her father despite being estranged for a long time. He’s seen as a tragic figure who just couldn’t overcome. We empathize with him and his down-and-out plight. When MLK was assassinated he told Booker, “It’s gonna hurt whites, too, the loss of Dr. King.” He understood his friend’s pain and what trying to kill the Dream meant for all of us.
Through the Groves is a memoir needing to overcome.
There’s nostalgia in some of what Hull recollects, but mostly we feel emotional pain. The first hint, the sleepwalking incident at three when she managed to walk out the front door unnoticed, made it across the lawn and street. Sleepwalking reflects some type of stress, as did Hull’s bedwetting bouts each time her mother moved her and her much easier-going younger brother Dwight someplace else.
Hull saw her mother’s restlessness. Her father never stepped foot out of Florida, whereas her mother grew up in Prospect Park, a borough of New York City. Raised around luxuries, her father around “God and oranges.”
Hull’s mother wasn’t around a lot, especially when she became an elementary school teacher, with higher ambitions, as a single-mother. Interestingly, Hull didn’t think of her that way, blessed with two substitute mothers: Damie and Ceola, a $5 a day caregiver/housekeeper/playmate. She lived on the wrong side of the tracks in what was called Black Sebring, or Colored Town, or other degrading names. Her world “felt like a separate town.” Separate and not equal.
Despite the emotional chaos of Hull’s formative years, she displays the kind of emotional restraint you’d expect of a seasoned journalist. This isn’t a poor-me examination of her early years described in sappy or angry prose. The three times she uses the word “sobbed” and once writes about tears speaks volumes. Less becomes more in this slim yet poignant memoir.
What we see is a journalist’s powers of observation, clarity of prose, ability to tell stirring accounts but not by overdramatizing them. Hull’s voice feels authentic, truthful, and from someone not seeking the limelight.
What we don’t see is how she picked up the pieces to become an acclaimed journalist. We’re left waiting for a second memoir that tells us how she became who she is.
Anne Hull’s memoir of memories goes as far back to when she was three years old, to her early twenties. What do the events she recalls tell us about Hull?
An absorbing question knowing she’s the recipient of prestigious journalism awards that recognize Courage in Journalism (Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award), and the advancement of Human Rights (RFK Journalism Grand Prize Award).
Aware of these distinctions, you may find yourself looking for the emergence of skills and characteristics you imagine an acclaimed journalist might possess. That’s what makes reading this memoir different than others who also grew up impoverished, in an unstable home, in an oppressive place – in Hull’s case, undeveloped, “desolate” Central Florida in the 60s before Disney broke ground. Her father, son of citrus-growers, once told his six-year-old daughter that where they lived “was no place for a child, though Disney was betting otherwise.”
That town was Sebring, an area below “four thousand square miles of rural lands and unmarked roads” referred to as the Ridge. Back then, having the “heaviest concentration of citrus groves in the world.” Lurking under canopies of beautiful oak trees with “mossy beards” was a world not fit for a child. So why isolate and coop up a young girl in the blazing, humid summers inside a truck without air-conditioning and a windshield coated with “pesticide dust”? Why did her mother Victoria insist she accompany him? Driving through, checking on the orange groves he was in charge of for HP Hood milk company’s citrus subsidiary, now gone. “Almost nothing in Florida stays the same way,” Hull reflects, capturing some things that haven’t changed.
Her early memories etch a sense of outsiderhood: formidable “aloneness” and injustice a young girl perceptively picked up on and figured out. One involved her father’s right-hand man who supervised a hard-laboring crew of fruit pickers, Booker Sanders. Yes, his name evokes Bernie Sanders, senior Senator from Vermont, who’d have fought for Booker for Mayor of Sebring since he was by far the more qualified candidate but not happening in this white man’s world. Racism is alive and well, rearing its ugly head in another episode of a black man served at a lunch counter after segregation ended yet still treated like a dog. Is it any wonder, then, that Hull grew up to report on stories of racism, isolation, poverty over the twenty years she worked for The Washington Post?
The memoir makes you think of other people too. Like the often-quoted, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, who penned, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Hull’s childhood was wild in the emotionally unsettling, uprooted sense, and geographically playing in “spooky” cypress swamps teaming with alligators, mosquitoes, and chemicals. Her father sold pesticides for ORTHO, the chemical company. Can you hear Rachel Carson screaming? Once he was promoted to managing orange groves, the climate determined his family’s livelihood. Drought and cold weather became significant factors in his emotional distress and alcoholism.
Hull couldn’t have answered Oliver’s poetic question during the years she looks back on. Instead, she chooses issues she grew up in, around, and observed. Including culture wars between two parents whose values, aims, and worldliness were polar opposites, and a culture’s deep-seated religious faith and conservatism that didn’t allow her to freely express herself. A bright spot, more like a spotlight, was her maternal grandmother, Olive or Damie. A bohemian, “an ethereal flower,” she relocated to St. Petersburg from Brooklyn when she became widowed. Her Gulf Coast home was cluttered with “tribal masks, hookah pipes, Chinese scrolls, Bombay wicker fans” that drove her mother crazy when they lived with her, but the guitar-playing, Beatles and Carly Simon fan Damie let Hull be who she wanted to be.
On September 27, 2004, Hull wrote an article for the Post titled “A Slow Journey from Isolation,” in which she speaks of her “coming out” as a journey. Hull chose to play with toy soldiers over dolls. Again, keenly aware early on, seeing herself as a “tomboy” preferring to play with boys, fishing in the plentiful lakes, running around in pants not dresses. Her mother and paternal grandmother Gigi did what they could to direct her to more feminine things. Not that the two saw eye- to-eye all the time, with Gigi a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She lived in a town called Hopewell. An ironic name for a place that felt hopeless.
In fourth grade, Hull did find two kindred girlfriends. She recognized the threesome as outcasts. One a black girl, the other a girl who liked and treated her black classmate swell. Housed in a brand-new school named Stonewall Jackson Elementary, governed by a school board that fought against integration for eight years, how did this affect Hull’s sensitivities?
The budding journalist, though, stays balanced, showing a generous side of Gigi and, more profoundly, her father despite being estranged for a long time. He’s seen as a tragic figure who just couldn’t overcome. We empathize with him and his down-and-out plight. When MLK was assassinated he told Booker, “It’s gonna hurt whites, too, the loss of Dr. King.” He understood his friend’s pain and what trying to kill the Dream meant for all of us.
Through the Groves is a memoir needing to overcome.
There’s nostalgia in some of what Hull recollects, but mostly we feel emotional pain. The first hint, the sleepwalking incident at three when she managed to walk out the front door unnoticed, made it across the lawn and street. Sleepwalking reflects some type of stress, as did Hull’s bedwetting bouts each time her mother moved her and her much easier-going younger brother Dwight someplace else.
Hull saw her mother’s restlessness. Her father never stepped foot out of Florida, whereas her mother grew up in Prospect Park, a borough of New York City. Raised around luxuries, her father around “God and oranges.”
Hull’s mother wasn’t around a lot, especially when she became an elementary school teacher, with higher ambitions, as a single-mother. Interestingly, Hull didn’t think of her that way, blessed with two substitute mothers: Damie and Ceola, a $5 a day caregiver/housekeeper/playmate. She lived on the wrong side of the tracks in what was called Black Sebring, or Colored Town, or other degrading names. Her world “felt like a separate town.” Separate and not equal.
Despite the emotional chaos of Hull’s formative years, she displays the kind of emotional restraint you’d expect of a seasoned journalist. This isn’t a poor-me examination of her early years described in sappy or angry prose. The three times she uses the word “sobbed” and once writes about tears speaks volumes. Less becomes more in this slim yet poignant memoir.
What we see is a journalist’s powers of observation, clarity of prose, ability to tell stirring accounts but not by overdramatizing them. Hull’s voice feels authentic, truthful, and from someone not seeking the limelight.
What we don’t see is how she picked up the pieces to become an acclaimed journalist. We’re left waiting for a second memoir that tells us how she became who she is.
May 1, 2023
Very good read. Would highly recommend. A great insight on the authors formative years and how life changes can shape a person
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