It would be wrong to call Hollis Gillespie the female David Sedaris, but they could be a tag team. Besides writing short, funny and from the heart and sharing the embrace of National Public Radio, both have a hard-knocks sensibility that escaped the collegiate bland machine.
"Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories" by Hollis Gillespie; Regan Books ($24.95)
In "Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories" (Regan Books, $24.95), Gillespie's quirky essays are hyper-hyperbolic and artfully coarse, newspaper-column short yet digressive as a blotto drunk's route home. Gillespie writes about gentrifying around the crackheads in her Atlanta neighborhood - one of them called her Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, which became the title of her first essay collection - and about her fractious family and friends, "all flawed in the most fabulous ways."
New for this book is Gillespie's own single motherhood, which produces a bleakly comic masterpiece about childproofing a house against the stray gunfire of feuding drug dealers.
A bit of predictability forms around her unpredictability, and occasionally there's a whiff of sitcom homily. But then she grabs you again, perhaps with an opening like this: "Grant is so afraid I'm gonna find Jesus that he sometimes reminds me of my atheist mother, who used to fend off Bible-wielding Jesus freaks with lit cigarettes."
Comments
LJWorld.com doesn’t necessarily condone the comments here, nor does it review every post. Read our full policy. Also, read about banned accounts and harassing comments.