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Apron Strings: A Novel
At seven years old, Sallee Mackey is wary of the grownups that populate her 1950s Southern worldespecially her mother, Ginnyand with good reason.
Ginny is flat-out dangerous, particularly if she is crossed while in one of her moods. While Sallee learns early on to rely on furtiveness and a watchful eye in an attempt to live in harmony with her family, the familys long-time black maid becomes her one saving grace. But even Ethel has secrets. Ethel and Ginnys relationship goes back to girlhood. While Ginny has conveniently forgotten that fact, Sallee hasnt. As she questions Ethel about the mysteries of their shared history, their bigoted next-door neighbor knows that he too, shares that same past. As marital and neighborhood tensions rise, Sallee discovers growing schisms inside her home that lead to conflicted loyalties that threaten to destroy not only Ethel, but also the children she loves.
Apron Strings shares the compelling story of a well-to-do white girl and her familys black maid as they unite to overcome the hatred and segregation embedded in their 1950s southern culture, and prove that love sees no color.
Ginny is flat-out dangerous, particularly if she is crossed while in one of her moods. While Sallee learns early on to rely on furtiveness and a watchful eye in an attempt to live in harmony with her family, the familys long-time black maid becomes her one saving grace. But even Ethel has secrets. Ethel and Ginnys relationship goes back to girlhood. While Ginny has conveniently forgotten that fact, Sallee hasnt. As she questions Ethel about the mysteries of their shared history, their bigoted next-door neighbor knows that he too, shares that same past. As marital and neighborhood tensions rise, Sallee discovers growing schisms inside her home that lead to conflicted loyalties that threaten to destroy not only Ethel, but also the children she loves.
Apron Strings shares the compelling story of a well-to-do white girl and her familys black maid as they unite to overcome the hatred and segregation embedded in their 1950s southern culture, and prove that love sees no color.
272 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 29, 2017
1 person want to read
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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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 30, 2023
I really enjoyed reading this family saga that took place in the south during the 1950's. So of course there was racism, sexism and bigotry.
The characters were fleshed out well by the author and I especially liked Ethel's backstory.
However, the book just ended. ENDED. I read a chapter and then there was a one page EPILOGUE. You've got to be kidding!!! It went on to say there was a sequel. Now that's just plain bait and switch.
The characters were fleshed out well by the author and I especially liked Ethel's backstory.
However, the book just ended. ENDED. I read a chapter and then there was a one page EPILOGUE. You've got to be kidding!!! It went on to say there was a sequel. Now that's just plain bait and switch.
Displaying 1 of 1 review