Margaret Eby

I'm a critic and journalist who lives in Brooklyn, but I left my heart in the place I grew up: Down South in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2006, my parents moved from Birmingham to Jackson, Mississippi, four hours further south and west. When I visited them, I always gravitated towards the bookstore, of course, and soon developed a fascination with Jackson's patron literary saint, Eudora Welty. I had read her books before, but being in the place that she wrote about and lived felt different to me. There was a connection between her home and her writing that was almost tangible in Jackson, particularly in the garden of her house that curators had lovingly restored. Before I knew it I was plotting visits to other author's homes in the South, trying to piece together a sense of the place I grew up from the fiction about it. My book, South Toward Home, is about that journey. I visited Oxford, Mississippi to peer into William Faulkner's liquor cabinet and visit Larry Brown and Barry Hannah's fishing spot, and traveled down to New Orleans to hunt out clues of the place John Kennedy Toole wrote about in Confederacy of Dunces. I went to Georgia to talk to Harry Crews' family, and spent a day with the peacocks at Andalusia, Flannery O'Connor's farm. For more about the book (and the events I'm speaking at!) visit margareteby.com