Redneck Way of Knowledge: Down-Home Tales

by Blanche McCrary Boyd

This intoxicating book by the author of The Revolution of Little Girls combines autobiography, reporting, and the dressed-up lies we call fiction. An underground classic since its initial publication, it is the wildly funny personal testament of Blanche McCrary Boyd, sixties radical and born-againÀ Southerner, a lesbian with an un-P.C. passion for skydiving and stock-car racing, a graduate of Esalen and kundalini yoga who now takes her altered states "raw, like oysters."

The Redneck Way of Knowledge is about family reunions and kamikaze love affairs. It is about crashing an arts festival with two precociously decayed Charleston aristocrats and watching the Pope deliver Communion at Yankee Stadium. It is about the selves we try on and slough off on the way to becoming who we are. Throughout, Blanche Boyd travels the expressway between the realm of the senses and the state of grace, and reports on the journey in prose that combines riotous humor, diamond-hard intelligence, and savage lyricism.

Genres: Essays, Fiction, Queer, Southern, Humor

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Blanche McCrary Boyd (born 1945) is an American author whose novels are known for their eccentric characters.

Among the awards Boyd has won are a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993–1994, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship in 1988, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission in 1982–1983 and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1967–1968. She was nominated for the Southern Book Award for The Revolution of Little Girls in 1991, and also won the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction that same year. She was nominated for the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction again in 1997.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Monica]

I’m shocked that I haven’t read this before. It’s engaging writing—and especially insightful to have been written 40 years ago.

[Diaman]

Messy lesbian fun!!!

[Emilia P]

Aw man, the copy I got was too old to have a Dorothy Alison foreword. Curses. This is a bunch of pieces about Southern life that Boyd wrote for the Village Voice around 1980. I kind of love this era of tough lady sort of disillusioned with mainstream feminism but still sort of old-fashioned butchness. Is that a thing? Is that a genre? I hope so. There's stuff about fancy drinking parties and politics and seeing the pope and going to car races. But the most interesting thing turns out to be the story of a really serious attack on members of the Communist Worker's Party by the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979, which killed 5 members of the CWP (themselves a pretty radical but essentially nonviolent at that moment organization). Jesus, I had no idea this happened. America's kinda scary sometimes yo.

[Kirsti]

"Being a white Southerner is a bit like being Eichmann's daughter: People don't assume you're guilty, but they wonder how you've been affected."

Entertaining, disturbing, vivid essays on Southernism, alcoholism, Republicanism, racism, lesbianism, Communism, and various other belief systems. Oh, and also the Rockettes, the pope, and alligator attacks.

[Hope]

I read this book several years ago and loved it. I don't know what I would think of it now, but the fact I still remember it says a lot. I read a LOT of books and most of them just fade from memory. This one stuck.

[Bonnie]

2 thumbs up.

[Benjamin Thomas Sutpen]

http://sensemania.blogspot.com/2009/1...

[V]

Read this in 1997. Do not remember but I wrote that fact down in my journal.

[Carissa Thatcher]

Maybe I missed the point but seemed like a handbook on how to drink and drug your way through every social occasion with brief intermission for a massacre....maybe things were different in 1982.