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If It Ain’T One Thing . . .
Nearly forty years ago, when she left home and moved to New York, Sallee Mackey was ready to start her law career and find a man to love. Peter seemed just the guya glamorous attorney who was different in all the right ways. Her family didnt always approve of him, but Sallee stuck by his side, even when it pushed her away from the Mackey clan.
Now, Sallees petulant daughter Virginia is getting married, and she has chosen to do so at her grandmothers farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sallee is hesitant to return to her roots, but she doesnt have an option. She wont miss her daughters wedding. Family matriarch Ginny has even renovated the barn to entice the entire family to attend, no matter how many new skeletons tumble from half-open closets.
Overall, Sallee is happy to see her daughter marry but is concerned about her daughters fianc, who has recently been discovered to be a star just starred in an as-yet-to-be-named pornographic film. Tension only increases when Virginia loses what little cool she once possessed. The Mackey family will have to hash out all sorts of old grudges as the weather forecast portends the biggest blizzard in years.
Now, Sallees petulant daughter Virginia is getting married, and she has chosen to do so at her grandmothers farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sallee is hesitant to return to her roots, but she doesnt have an option. She wont miss her daughters wedding. Family matriarch Ginny has even renovated the barn to entice the entire family to attend, no matter how many new skeletons tumble from half-open closets.
Overall, Sallee is happy to see her daughter marry but is concerned about her daughters fianc, who has recently been discovered to be a star just starred in an as-yet-to-be-named pornographic film. Tension only increases when Virginia loses what little cool she once possessed. The Mackey family will have to hash out all sorts of old grudges as the weather forecast portends the biggest blizzard in years.
282 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 29, 2017
About the author
Mary Morony
10 books84 followersMary Morony is a Southern Fiction Novelist and author of Apron Strings and Done Growed Up, the first two books in her Apron Strings Trilogy. She is also a contributing columnist for Albemarle Magazine and Keswick Life Magazine and she maintains a consistent and entertaining blog on her website http://marymorony.com
Mary delivers a tour de force of honest characters, lively humor, and heartbreaking tragedy. She writes her novels in a candid voice, refusing to sugarcoat anything. She brings Southern charm, irreverence and wit to bear against subjects as vast as racism and as personal as alcoholism, always with a heart and soul that makes her work undeniably appealing.
Her Apron Strings trilogy, a series of novels that moves from the South to New York City and back between the 1950s and the early 21st century, draws on the life she knew growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a time when Virginia was still very much a part of the Jim Crow South.
One of six children, Mary was born into a family and a culture that would give her some of her best material. It was a time and place of segregated schools and water fountains, as well as restaurants and movie theaters that prohibited black customers. With five siblings in a household of dysfunctional adults Morony’s survival skills came to include a sharply honed sense of humor, which she herself has called her greatest talent and her biggest foible.
But amid the chaos, the woman who was the family servant also became Morony’s inspiration, teaching her love and acceptance with warmth, humor, and unending patience – and becoming the model, finally, for a central character in Apron Strings.
Morony has crammed more into one lifetime than most people would in five -- married four times by the age of 35, divorced three times and widowed once, she finds no shortage of material for her novels in the everyday lives around her. Keep your eyes open, she says, and you’ll find tragedy at a wedding and hilarity at a funeral.
Morony says she likes big projects, has a hard time reining herself in – “ask anybody who knows me” – and seldom does things in a conventional time frame. This may account for her not having finished her B.A. – in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from the University of Virginia – until she was in her forties, by then with four children: one in graduate school, one a sophomore in college, one in high school, and the youngest in nursery school.
“Funerals, you’d be surprised,” she says. “I see some of my favorite human interactions at a funeral – there’s an honesty there that you don’t find in other gatherings. My mantra is: If it doesn’t kill you, it will make a good story – and even if it does kill you, it will make a good story for someone! I can and have found things to laugh about in death, divorce, mental illness, and most of all, people’s pettiness – including my own.”
Telling stories, Morony says, became her lifeline for survival over a lifetime. With alcoholism and bipolar disorder in her family, with deaths and divorces, and children of her own to raise and educate, she says, “I have lived a life chock full of stories, and I do mean chock full.”
Her husband Ralph, of now almost 30 years, came into her life from Ireland – “I had to import him!” she jokes – between marriages. Like the four children he helped raise – three from her earlier marriages – and their menagerie of dogs, he is well acquainted with her relentless sense of humor – even if, she points out, she may be the only one laughing. A sense of humor, however, actually seems to be a shared family trait, since even after decades together, he still makes her laugh – “that is, when I don’t want to dismember him for some reason or another.”
Mary delivers a tour de force of honest characters, lively humor, and heartbreaking tragedy. She writes her novels in a candid voice, refusing to sugarcoat anything. She brings Southern charm, irreverence and wit to bear against subjects as vast as racism and as personal as alcoholism, always with a heart and soul that makes her work undeniably appealing.
Her Apron Strings trilogy, a series of novels that moves from the South to New York City and back between the 1950s and the early 21st century, draws on the life she knew growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a time when Virginia was still very much a part of the Jim Crow South.
One of six children, Mary was born into a family and a culture that would give her some of her best material. It was a time and place of segregated schools and water fountains, as well as restaurants and movie theaters that prohibited black customers. With five siblings in a household of dysfunctional adults Morony’s survival skills came to include a sharply honed sense of humor, which she herself has called her greatest talent and her biggest foible.
But amid the chaos, the woman who was the family servant also became Morony’s inspiration, teaching her love and acceptance with warmth, humor, and unending patience – and becoming the model, finally, for a central character in Apron Strings.
Morony has crammed more into one lifetime than most people would in five -- married four times by the age of 35, divorced three times and widowed once, she finds no shortage of material for her novels in the everyday lives around her. Keep your eyes open, she says, and you’ll find tragedy at a wedding and hilarity at a funeral.
Morony says she likes big projects, has a hard time reining herself in – “ask anybody who knows me” – and seldom does things in a conventional time frame. This may account for her not having finished her B.A. – in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from the University of Virginia – until she was in her forties, by then with four children: one in graduate school, one a sophomore in college, one in high school, and the youngest in nursery school.
“Funerals, you’d be surprised,” she says. “I see some of my favorite human interactions at a funeral – there’s an honesty there that you don’t find in other gatherings. My mantra is: If it doesn’t kill you, it will make a good story – and even if it does kill you, it will make a good story for someone! I can and have found things to laugh about in death, divorce, mental illness, and most of all, people’s pettiness – including my own.”
Telling stories, Morony says, became her lifeline for survival over a lifetime. With alcoholism and bipolar disorder in her family, with deaths and divorces, and children of her own to raise and educate, she says, “I have lived a life chock full of stories, and I do mean chock full.”
Her husband Ralph, of now almost 30 years, came into her life from Ireland – “I had to import him!” she jokes – between marriages. Like the four children he helped raise – three from her earlier marriages – and their menagerie of dogs, he is well acquainted with her relentless sense of humor – even if, she points out, she may be the only one laughing. A sense of humor, however, actually seems to be a shared family trait, since even after decades together, he still makes her laugh – “that is, when I don’t want to dismember him for some reason or another.”
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March 19, 2021
The last in the "Apron Strings" trilogy, the Mackey family all get together as grown adults with children and grandchildren when one of the grandchildren decides she wants to marry at her grandparents home. Each of the family members, Gordon, Stuart, Helen and Sallee, all have dysfunctional children and/or relationships. I struggled to keep up with all the characters in this book. When a snow storm moves in causing the cancellation of the wedding and two of the characters end up injured, each individual member of the family is forced to look inward and reexamine their relationships and themselves. Overall, I really didn't like this final chapter of the three books. So much time has elapsed since the second book and it was just difficult keeping up with which child belonged to which family member. I needed a genealogy chart. The ending seemed rushed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review