THROUGH THE GROVES

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist chronicles her childhood and formative years in rural central Florida.

When she was young, Hull often accompanied her father through the orange groves he tended as a fruit buyer for the juice processor HP Hood. Her schoolteacher mother had designated her the “ride-along minder” meant to “steer [her father] clear of the red neon Schlitz signs that called to him on his drive home.” Before Hull’s parents had settled in the town that, every spring, smelled “like God had knocked over a bottle of Ladies of Gardenia,” both had dreamed of becoming writers. That dream ended when Hull’s mother, unwilling to nurse her husband’s “illness” any longer, took her children back and forth between Sebring and St. Petersburg as she struggled to make a life on her own. The family finally settled in “St. Pete,” a city of “old people.” Living in her eccentric grandmother’s house among “Tibetan singing bowls [and] Guatemalan handicrafts” made Hull feel more at ease. Her mother eventually remarried, this time to a man she didn’t love and who didn’t appreciate “kids who talked back.” The newly sober father with whom she began reconciling paid for Hull’s “escape” to Florida State, where she embraced her nascent lesbianism and became a Revlon shampoo sales representative. “Being aimless and average at nineteen was excusable; at twenty-two, I was ready to grab any piece of driftwood floating by that might keep me from going under,” she writes. Then a small newsroom job with the St. Petersburg Times kick-started the writing career neither of her parents chose to pursue—she went on to work for more than two decades at the Washington Post—and it began the unlikely journey that took Hull away from her multigenerational roots. This warmly evocative recollection of her formative years will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who enjoy understated, stylishly well-told stories.

A funny, candid, and authentic memoir.