Bitter in the Mouth
Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70s and 80s, Linda Hammerick believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. For as long as she can remember, Linda can “taste” words. In this and other ways, her body is a mystery to her. With the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters though they live only streets away from each other, Linda makes her way through a girlhood haunted by these incantatory last words that her grandmother says to her: “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two.”
When a family tragedy compels Linda, now a thirty-year-old woman, to return to Boiling Springs, she uncovers the startling story of her life. Bitter in the Mouth is a story that questions what it means to be a family and to be a friend, to be foreign and to be familiar, and to be connected and disconnected from our bodies, our past, and our histories.
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