3 Fiction & 2 Nonfiction Books About Women's Experience In Appalachia To Add To Your Reading List

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As United as the States may be, the country's vast expanses mean that sharp cultural differences are all but inevitable. From the laid-back West Coast to the fast-paced Tri-State Area and the friendly and sociable Midwest, where you live has an enormous effect on how you live. Nowhere is that arguably more true than around the Appalachian Mountains, where the rugged terrain insulates the community, resulting in a deeply rooted folk culture that's going strong, even as globalization homogenizes so much of the modern world.

Historically and today, women have played a key role in building Appalachian culture. They've harvested the crops, created the art and music, and fought for the rights that define Appalachian society right alongside the men. Appalachian women are famously hardy, and the stories of their lives are equally fascinating and diverse. From works of fiction to powerful memoirs by non-celebrities with important stories to tell, we've sifted through the riches to bring you the best of the best for your next literary trip to the Great Smoky Mountains, or just to broaden your lowland horizons. All you have to do is fire up the bluegrass, maybe splash a little bourbon into your beverage of choice, and let these titles take you away.

Academic opportunities are sparse and underfunded in Appalachia, but that hasn't stopped a litany of writers who call the region home from rising to the top in their field. In 1988's "Fair and Tender Ladies," Ivy Rowe hopes to become one of them. Her writing talent is apparent from her letters to various loved ones that comprise Lee Smith's epistolary novel, even as her literary ambitions are thwarted time and again by the realities of living in a mid-century Virginia mining town. "Her work has a mixture of lyricism and sexual boldness," Newsweek wrote about Smith in its review. At the same time, the Los Angeles Times mused, "'Fair and Tender Ladies' is one of several new novels about the South that seem written less to enhance the author's reputation than simply to salute what it means to come from a place so beautiful, so poor, so isolated."

Smith can certainly speak to the experience of growing up as a wordsmith in Appalachia; having sold short stories for a nickel each from the age of nine in her hometown of Grundy, Virginia, the beginning of Ivy Rowe's journey might as well have been hers. "Fair and Tender Ladies" might not be a feel-good story, but Smith is living proof that it could have been. She's also the author of one of Dolly Parton's favorite books, and you don't get much more Appalachian street cred than that, Dolly being a Tennessee girl herself.

Where "Fair and Tender Ladies" is about a person living in a place, 1987's "Storming Heaven" is about a place full of people. Through the eyes of several interconnected families, Denise Giardina tells the story of how coal companies coerced residents of the fictional town of Annadel (based on Keystone, West Virginia) to sell their land and work for them at the turn of the 20th century. Among those people are a coal camp nurse and an Italian miner's wife.

The story culminates at the Battle of Blair Mountain, a real 1921 conflict between union mining activists and the local police forces who served the interests of the mine operators, which left up to 100 people dead. Like Smith, Giardina knows from whence she speaks. She grew up in a West Virginia coal camp, and has even been arrested at labor protests of the coal industry.

When one thinks of missionary work, it's usually within the context of sending missionaries across international borders. The idea of sending them to Tennessee sounds almost satirical, but Christy Huddleston's journey to Cutter Gap to volunteer as a schoolteacher is nothing but earnest. The upper-class 19-year-old from Asheville, North Carolina, is a fish out of water among the unpretentious mountain folk, and she faces challenges that have her questioning everything she knows about faith, love, and courage.

The legacy of "Christy" and her experiences teaching — and learning from — the Cutter Gap community have echoed backward and forward through time. The 1967 novel was based on the true story of Catherine Marshall's mother, Leonora Whitaker, and her volunteer work teaching in the Appalachian mountains. It was also adapted nearly 30 years later into a TV series featuring "ER" star Kellie Martin. In 1994, that was just about the highest honor possible.

Technically, "The Glass Castle" takes place all over the country. In Jeannette Walls' 2005 memoir, the young future journalist travels with her alcoholic father and unreliable mother from coast to coast as they attempt to outrun financial responsibility. They do settle for several years in Welch, West Virginia, however, providing a resonant backdrop against which the maturing Walls children can come to terms with the ramifications of their upbringing. One by one, they start plotting their escape to New York, even as their parents cling to the coal town where their father grew up.

"The Glass Castle" was a runaway success, clocking a whopping 440 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was also adapted in 2017 as a feature film starring Oscar winner and Captain Marvel herself, Brie Larson, as Jeannette. The film opened to mixed reviews, and Walls' memoir subsequently fell out of the public eye, but this forgotten book from the early 2000s deserves to be rediscovered.

The subtitle of Hazel Lindsey and Julia Walker's 2015 memoir — "The true story of a Tennessee plowgirl who overcame poverty, abuse, and eleven husbands with wit, wisdom, and tenacity" — really says it all. In the eight and a half decades she spent on this planet, most of them in Marlow, Tennessee, Lindsey (better known to her loved ones as "Fireball") seemed to live as many lives as a cat. She was a notorious local musician, a farmer, a businesswoman, mother and wife to many, and even briefly a movie star, playing the wife of a coal miner in 1999's "October Sky." She survived cancer, but almost lost her life to an ex-husband. She unfortunately buried two children, but misplaced another ex's corpse.

All in all, Lindsey's life was both jaw-droppingly extraordinary and brutally mundane. Unlike most of the women on these pages, she had no particular literary aspirations; it was her best friend, Julia Walker, who transcribed her tale for posterity. What she did have was an amazing story that should be told by more than just her great-great-grandchildren, of whom she had several. Lindsey died the year after "Fireball" was published, at the age of 85, but she lives on forever in the Appalachian canon.

We scoured the internet for book recommendations about women's experiences in Appalachia. We included both fiction and nonfiction, exploring both the imagined possibilities and true narratives of such lives. We selected titles that centered women as characters (most importantly as narrators, for the best insight into their interior lives) who lived at least a significant portion of their lives in or around the Appalachian mountain range. We then ranked the resulting list in order of average Goodreads review score, eliminating titles with fewer than 1,000 reviews to ensure a wide sample size.