Greater still is the way Stringfellow describes people, especially the women. Whether describing the house or the city of Memphis, each scene is grounded in its setting. … It was the finishing touch to a Southern symphony all conducted on a quarter-acre plot.ĭescription is Stringfellow’s great gift. Wide stone steps led to a front porch covered in heavy green ivy and honeysuckle and morning glory. But what made the house breathe, what gave the house its lungs, was its front porch. … A long driveway traversed the length of the yard, cut in half by a folding wooden barn gate. The low house was a cat napping in the shade of plum trees. The book, which alternates between voices and time periods, opens in 1995 with 10-year-old Joan stating simply: “The house looked living.” A beat later, she elaborates: They have fled Miriam’s husband, escaping the violence he has inflicted on her for years. The story opens with Miriam North and her daughters Joan and Mya arriving at the family home in Memphis, where Miriam’s sister August still lives. A family tree contains multitudes.īut what of the setting? Readers of Memphis will find no shortage there, either.

We can’t know where this family is going to take us, but we know there will be complexity and depth. These names, each with their birth, marriage, and death dates, are spread before the reader like a map. Stringfellow’s debut novel Memphis opens with the North family tree, simply but beautifully designed. While a map might do all these things, I tend to favor a different introduction to a book’s world: a family tree. To them, the map represents the imaginative world built by the author, one full of complexities and depth and a setting so fully realized as to require its own geography. There are readers who claim that every great novel must have a map in the front.

Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow