[REVIEW] Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly, Edited by Lee Gutkind and Beth Ann Fennelly

Review by Kate Schapira

As a reviewer, I may have come in the wrong door. I’m not from the South, and I’ve never lived there or even been there for very long. What’s more, the word “sin” puts my back up — it reminds me of ads that refer to chocolate as a “guilty pleasure.” Oh, for heaven’s sake. Just relish the damn thing.

But what if you can’t? Or what if the guilt really does make the pleasure sweeter? What if, as Dorothy Allison suggests in her introduction, it fills you with defiant pride — the lie you get everyone to believe, the truth you fling in everyone’s face?

Sin as a show, as I’ll show them, appears more than once in this collection: Chelsea Rathburn, in “The Renters”, offers aid and comfort to a couple having an extramarital affair partly to thumb her nose at her ex-husband, “so squeamish about all things sexual.” The essays’ displays of intimacy, physical glut and emotional mess, feel less like confessions than like exposures.

As often happens with themed anthologies, the quality of the writing varies from entry to entry. Sarah Einstein’s “Fat” powerfully evokes the ambiguities of food, desire and care, and Louella Bryant offers a smooth blend of personal and familial narrative and cultural history in “Rum Running Queen.” “No Other Gods” by Sarah Gilbert, though raw, is striking in its explicit engagement with sin as a betrayal of something important, and bold in its shift of what is important, essential, to the writer. “Rahab’s Thread” by Katie Burgess is funny and painful in ways reminiscent of Lynda Barry’s tales of growing up. (“Before you came forth out of the womb, my child,” God intones, “I ordained that you should marry Jonathan Knight. But now you would jeopardize those plans?”) And Adriana Paramo’s “Tongues, Lust and a Man From Indiana” combines lust and loneliness–not just personal, but historical–to suggest why people might break not rules but promises.

Personal and familial histories and discoveries are, by and large, stronger presences here than the larger, deadlier currents that flow through the United States. In at least three of these essays the writers mention the whiteness of skin — their own or, in the case of one historical reconstruction, a protagonist’s — with some sort of relish, whether lust or disgust. Southern Sin has an overwhelmingly white contributor list, which doesn’t reflect the South of the present. Only “Out of the Woods” by Gail Griffin confronts racism — not just in the South, but as a foundational and living part of the story of the United States. Her essay acknowledges the racist attitudes she found in the South, and also those she, a transplant, brought with her.

Allison writes in her introduction that of the seven deadlies, sloth is underrepresented here, but lazy phrases and slack lines mar many of these essays. And perhaps unsurprisingly in a sin-themed anthology, many of them suffer from over-explanation.

In “What Was Left,” Molly Langmuir writes, “Whatever physical dangers we could find weren’t nearly as frightening as the feelings we carried around inside of us.” Moments of daring and delectation are bracketed in many of these pieces by decidedly unsexy cruelties and humiliations, the writers as much sinned against as sinning; it’s the ability to act that they find freeing, even if the action ends in letdown or regret. We also see the dramatic desires and acts, the ones that “count” as sins, underpinned by other kinds of bonds and needs, particularly between women: “What Was Left” keeps a shared, mutual care at its heart. In “The Renters,” Rathburn’s conversations and connections with her friend Johanna and lodger Melinda are as weighty, and as real, as any aspect of the story that could be described as sinful. “A Lesson in Merging” is an elegy for the writer’s mentor as well as a rigorous accounting of her feelings for that mentor’s husband. Suzanne Roberts’s sister, in “Sportfucking in the South,” doubles as a voice of reason riding on the shoulder of the story of an ill-judged affair — the voice of reason, or judgment.

“Some of my best friends are sane, well-adjusted women,” editor Beth Ann Fennelly writes in her introductory note, with that little hint of distance, distaste, and relish that the phrase is meant to invoke — usually from the other side, the safe side. “You could, of course, behave badly yourself,” or you could read these stories “and see what you are missing.” The anthology seeks to occupy the site between the wrinkled nose and the licked lip, between prurience and prudery, but the best essays in it are the ones that pull back a little, to show not just a face or a body or a conjunction of bodies or an extra inch of thigh, but a larger and more complicated map of relationships and reasons.

***

Kate Schapira is the author of four full-length books and nine chapbooks of poetry. She lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown University and for Frequency Writers, and co-curates the Publicly Complex Reading Series. Recently, she has offered climate anxiety counseling in downtown Providence: http://climateanxietycounseling.wordpress.com