Celebration of Southern Literature
She’s Not There
Lookout Mountain writer Jamie Quatro wants to show you more, but she can’t ByRich Bailey
J
amie Quatro and her new book, “I Want To Show You More,” are red hot right now in the literary world. In March she received a full-page review in The New York Times Book Review and three pages in The New Yorker. At the Celebration of Southern Literature, Quatro is coteaching a pre-celebration short story workshop with her mentor, Jill McCorkle, and is a featured guest at one of 11 fundraising dinners in private homes. Reviewers have called her “outstanding” and “brilliant,” and praised the book—15 linked stories about religion, sex, family, death and running—as “horrifying,” “funny,” and “unique.” J. Robert Lennon in The New York Times Book Review called the book “a strange, thrilling and disarmingly honest piece of work” and “perhaps the most engaging literary treatment of Christianity since [Flannery] O’Connor, without a hint of the condescension the subject often receives in contemporary fiction.” No Personal Questions, Please When I approached Quatro through her publisher, Grove Atlantic, her publicist asked me to avoid any personal questions. Why? Because there have been too many interviewers who have looked at the recurring female adulteress—it’s hard not to go biblical, there’s so much Southern religion in the book— and asked about autobiographi-
cal elements. Fine, I said. I have no problem conceiving that a woman could write about a woman having an affair without it being a covert confession. And I’m not much interested in finding secret keys anyway. Sure enough, other interviews I read online sooner or later got around to asking about autobiography. It’s true, there are a lot of other non-salacious details that seem straightforwardly drawn from life. In addition to the recurring character having an affair, another group of stories revolves around a woman dying of cancer. Others feature
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chattanoogapulse.com • APRIL 18-24, 2013 • The Pulse • 7