Book excerpt: "Act your age! From her mother's admonition in childhood, a middle ages, twice-married mother of four and a product of the deep south of the seventies makes her way though a meandering inner journey towards a quiet epiphany revealing what her mother's words really mean. This rite of passage at the ungainly age of fifty unfolds through twelve memoir-like narratives that will evoke both laughter and tears. Each chapter is an independent reflection on the dozens of daily anecdotes all of us live each day in the course of growing up and growing older. Reading the narratives may be like going through a shoe box of old photographs you find in the attic, not arrange in any seeming order, but, in total, creating a logic of their own. Memorable characters like Papa, Aunt Norma, Harrison Augustus Turnbull, and Artemesia rise from the narrator's southern Gothic roots. The narrator, nameless Every Woman, prides herself in being an introspective and competent adult, but her naiveté demonstrates that being an adult a really a state of mind, and finding truth is like entertaining company with chipped china. Coping with life's poignant struggles, like disease, old age, suicide, and murder, and its ordinary ones, like child-raising, teaching, pets, and church-going, she seeks sense in the nonsense with humor and with love"--Page 4 of cover.