Welcome to Litsy!

Their friendship is born an early September day in 1947, in a freshman dorm, when the brassily Yankee and free-spirited Libba Charles first meets her roommate, a near perfect flower of modest young Southern womanhood in the person of Frances Simpson; and for forty-six years it flourishes. It ends with a promise. On her deathbed Frances extracts it from her three daughters�the utterly capable homemaker Alice; the recalcitrant Allegra, a recovering alcoholic; and bohemian Edie, who shrinks in the face of any commitment: their promise to �look after Libba.� As if the formidable, tough-minded Libba Charles, author of ten books, a literary celebrity, needed looking after. Yet when they are summoned by Libba to Creek Cabin, their mother�s summer hideaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, they go. None of them is prepared, though, for what they will discover there�about their mother, about Libba, about themselves�in this poignant, adroit rendering of reunions and farewells. (less)

Their friendship is born an early September day in 1947, in a freshman dorm, when the brassily Yankee and free-spirited Libba Charles first meets her roommate, a near perfect flower of modest young Southern womanhood in the person of (…more)