WHERE I COME FROM

A collection of slice-of-life columns from a celebrated Southern writer.

Like skilled comedians, skilled columnists use the vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies of their lives to tell stories with universal themes. As you learn about their people and their places, you find new ways to look at your own. In this compilation of previously published columns, the vast majority of which appeared in Southern Living and Garden & Gun, Bragg isn’t out to convince you of anything. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and popular memoirist just wants you to know what it’s like to live in his native South. That means eating sausage gravy in a diner, a po’boy in New Orleans, and hot chicken in Nashville—there’s a lot here about food, and Bragg knows how to make just about any dish sound delicious. It also means driving a Chevrolet, going fishing with your brother, beating back fire ants, hearing stories about a sweet departed aunt, and even having close encounters with Jerry Lee Lewis (Bragg wrote the music legend’s biography). The most poignant of these short works is a piece on a dog called Skinny, so named “because she was two dogs high and half a dog wide.” To be sure, not every piece is as memorable as Skinny’s, and a few are flimsy. Among them, the author writes multiple letters to Santa, and you can only go to that well once—if you should have occasion to go there at all. But such contrivances are the exception. On balance, the columns are clever, unassuming, and, most notably, told in a distinctive voice. They do what good columns do: sometimes tug at your heart, sometimes make you laugh to yourself, sometimes both. You read one and then go on with your day with a better sense of what it’s like to be from somewhere.

A column-per-day prescription for those looking to find a new friend on the page.