Home Truths

A Deep East Texas Memory

Gerald Duff

• Publisher: TCU Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780875654355
• eBook ISBN: 9780875654928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Novelist Gerald Duff grew up both in Polk County, in Deep East Texas, and in Nederland, near the Gulf Coast, two drastically different areas in terms of social and economic status, and the way they interact. These communities shaped the way Duff thought and lived, causing him to build up certain false personae to fit in with the crowd. These changes and more are described within the pages of Duff’s new memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory.

From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Duff’s memoir describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s. Other occurrences however, such as working a summer job and the awkwardness of first dates, speak to people of every generation, young and old.  

Early in life Duff learned to tell lies as a survival mechanism against his meddling family and occasionally cruel classmates. He describes the ordeal of hiding both his domestic situation and his talent for the written word. Duff’s talents for lies and half-truths helped him not only to discover a hidden talent within himself, but also a future career. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• 1 What You’re Named Is What You Are
• 2 God’s Hospital
• 3 The War in Texas
• 4 The Cat and Dog Picture Shows
• 5 The Calves of Dolly Roberts’s Legs
• 6 The Brass Knucks in Mama’s Dresser
• 7 What Reading Smelled Like
• 8 The Fall from Grace
• 9 A Talent for the Lie
• 10 The Water We Had to Drink
• 11 Washed in the Blood
• 12 What We Hunted
• 13 Take, Eat, This Is My Body
• 14 Kissing Linda Smith and Loving Jannis Jones
• 15 Leaving for Marshall Hall
• 16 Who Is a Cajun and Who Is a Negro?
• 17 Wanting Some Tongue, Too
• 18 Burning the Sofa My Sister Slept On
• 19 Arriving Late at Nederland High
• 20 The Way Louisiana Girls Smelled
• 21 Margaret, I Could Have Been a Good Abe Lincoln for You
• 22 Multiple Choice Questions
• 23 A Need for Relief
• 24 A Change of Major
• 25 Licking Down My Lunch in Fayetteville
• 26 A Foreign Student in Illinois
• 27 Not the Thing, But the Thing about the Thing
• 28 Fugitive at Vanderbilt
• 29 A Fortunate Fall
• 30 As Kool-Aid Is from Gin
• 31 Women Writing about Women Writing about Women
• 32 Cousin Joseph Winston Tells the Truth
• 33 From Honey Island to Menard Chapel
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR