In a frank and richly evocative memoir, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun recalls growing up in the Deep South.

Why did you feel now was the right time to write a memoir of your coming-of-age?
Moving from California (where I lived and worked for decades) back to the South reconnected me on many levels with the land I came from originally. Some of the connections were simple and primitive—the fecund and flowery smells, the cheerful sounds of the tree frogs, the grating drama of cicadas, the grand sunsets and the intense humidity. Maybe the sensory world where you first breathed and walked never leaves you. Feeling so at home again naturally brought up early memories. And they seemed to want to come to the light.

You write in depth about your parents’ drinking and how it painted your childhood, saying theirs was a marriage of “Southern Comfort, recriminations, and if onlys.” Was it hard to reveal this part of your life to readers?
Shame is a powerful emotion and a silencing one. I don’t feel shame but can see why I might. They were who they were. They operated under some pretty intense cultural pressures, and they burned out so early that they never had a chance to emerge into larger versions of themselves. I’m always sad for that. As parents, they were not ideal, but they did have wonderful qualities as well—gusto, humor, passion, generosity.

There are so many exquisite details in the book: the shape of your daddy’s fingernails, the hospital room where you visited your grandmother. Did you keep detailed journals as a kid, or do you have an incredible memory of certain moments?
My little red, locked diary is still on my desk. I kept notebooks always, and even a reading log. These stacks of journals are disappointing because they record events, not observations or feelings. But it’s odd—as I read them, the details come rushing back. The plain words unlock memory, and I can again feel the images and nuances.

You paint an endearing portrait of Willie Bell, who worked as a maid for your parents throughout your childhood. How influential a figure was she in your life?
As I wrote, it was not a Mammy sort of thing. She quietly offered me a perspective on the chaotic life within our house. So often she said, “When are you going to learn? Just don’t talk back.” I saw only in later years that she was revealing her own survival tactics as well as trying to keep me from getting switched! 

At one point, you write that you might have lived forever in Fitzgerald, Georgia. What do you think kept that from happening?
My mother! She wanted for me what she never achieved—a big life. An unconfined life. Even though I battled her about my local boyfriends she feared I would marry, her constant get-out-of-Dodge stance seeped in. By high school, I was planning my escape to the North, the forbidden land, the dreaded land. I only made it as far as Virginia at first!

As a child, you didn’t know the word racism. Looking back now, how racist was the time and place in which you grew up?
Oh, Lord. Give me a volume to write! It is very hard now to imagine the racism. And not only in the South. Beneath the violence and unfairness and craziness, I always sense that a deeper vein of connection binds blacks and whites in the South than ever has been explained.

How have you settled into life in North Carolina?
Love it! My husband, Ed, and I have had the great good luck to fall in with a group of writers, artists, cooks, readers, gardeners. We are having a fine time down here. We have a big creaky old house with a porch, many remodeling projects, and two gentlemen cats. I am loving roving around the South, as I did in my youth.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Tom Robbins had no intention of writing a memoir. “I was conned into it by the women in my life,” he says with a laugh during a call to his home in the small town of La Conner, Washington.

“They had been pestering me to write down the stories that I’d been telling them—bidden and unbidden—over the years. I wrote 20 pages and showed it to them, thinking that would shut them up. But it had the opposite effect.”

Bless the women in Tom Robbins’ life! They forced him into committing to paper Tibetan Peach Pie, a book that in conversation Robbins calls “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous” and in print carries the subtitle “A True Account of an Imaginative Life.” The book is both of these—and more.

Robbins calls his colorful new memoir “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous.”

Robbins, as fans of novels like Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Jitterbug Perfume (1980) or Villa Incognito (2003) know, has a Trickster spirit. He performs a sort of verbal-spiritual-comedic magic on the page. He characterizes his philosophical outlook, formed in part from his interest in Japan and Zen Buddhism, as “crazy wisdom and sacred mischief.”

“When I was in Japan,” he explains, “I got to have an audience with a famous Ninja, quite an old man. His house was full of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. This is true of the wisest people I have encountered in my life. They have all had this sense of playfulness. I think I was more or less born with it. It’s maintaining a fixed eye on the ultimate seriousness of life, but refusing to take events and, particularly, yourself too seriously.”

This energy and perspective also infuses Robbins’ memoir. Beginning as a child growing up in North Carolina and Virginia in the 1930s, Robbins writes that he was possessed by a seemingly inborn bohemianism and a “congenitally comic sensibility” that led his mother to lovingly refer to him as Tommy Rotten. He had a wandering, freedom-seeking spirit. He spent time in a military boarding school (where in a quixotic effort he foolishly re-entered a burning dormitory), time at Washington and Lee University (where Tom Wolfe, a founder of new journalism, was a big man on campus), and time in the U.S. Air Force in Korea (where he taught techniques of weather observation). He had four short marriages early in adulthood and, since 1987, a long one. He was an early, enthusiastic adopter of LSD and describes the first time he tried it as “the most rewarding day of my life, the one day I would not trade for any other.” He writes about, among many other events, encounters with Timothy Leary and Charles Manson and trips to far-flung regions of the world.

But Robbins also had an early love of words and stories. He won prizes—even in Air Force story-writing contests—for his fiction. He became a journalist. He was an art critic and music critic for underground newspapers in Seattle. And then he went to a concert by The Doors.

“It was so unlike any rock concert that Seattle had seen to that point. It just blew everybody away. I was in almost a traumatized state, an ecstatic trauma, when I went back to my house and up into the attic and sat down to write the review. It wasn’t that I was influenced by particular lyrics or by Jim Morrison’s style. It was such a cathartic experience that it loosened up something in my creative process. Almost instinctively I wrote the review. And then I thought, this is the way I want to sound from now on.”

Robbins’ first published novel, Another Roadside Attraction, became a kind of anthem of ’60s (or early ’70s) youth culture. “In that novel,” Robbins says, “I attempted not to write about the ’60s but to recreate the ’60s. In order to do that, I had to reinvent the novel, because the traditional novel moves from minor climax to minor climax to major climax, up an incline plane. But that didn’t lend itself to capturing that period with any depth or truth.”

“Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

That novel captured the zeitgeist so successfully that to this day people assume that Robbins writes while stoned and that his sensibilities are trapped in the ’60s. These assumptions make Robbins laugh. He writes in the memoir that he is a slow and deliberate writer who avoids even mild stimulants while working and that the concerns of his novels have moved further forward into issues of contemporary life than the outdated views of his critics. Robbins’ beautifully profligate prose is labored over one sentence at a time. “If you’re a professional, you show up every day,” he says. “Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

However, for the genre of fiction and the genre of memoir, Robbins waits on slightly different muses. About writing fiction, Robbins says, “I am one of the rare breed of writers who believes that the best part of writing is creating situations in which language can happen. I have to surround the act of writing with an aura of surprise and terror. So I take my research and imagination and my sense of humor and my vague feelings of where I want my day to go and pack them into my little canoe and push out onto the vast and savage ocean and see where the current takes me.”

Of this memoir he says, “I’m not inventing situations, I’m dealing with facts. The challenge for me was to keep the language lively and unpredictable, while remaining faithful to the facts.”

In July, Robbins will turn 82. That hardly seems possible given the antic energy of Tibetan Peach Pie. Wikipedia  and the Library of Congress can’t believe it either—they assert that Robbins is 4 years younger. “Wikipedia,” Robbins wryly notes, “is the fountain of youth. They obviously know more about me than my mother.”

These days Robbins goes to yoga and pilates classes, travels with his wife Alexa, and still shows up on time for his muse. In other words he stays connected with the women we must thank for his new memoir.

“I’ve had a messy life,” Robbins admits. “But in the tangle, I think the silver thread of spirituality, the red thread of passion and, of course, the elastic and multicolored thread of imagination have constantly run through it. And all of that is bound together with the inky thread of writing.”

That’s a self-assessment that sounds just about right.

Author photo credit Jeff Corwin.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The voice behind the popular web series “Ask a Mortician” exposes the grisly, hilarious details of working in a crematorium—and argues that everyone needs to be more closely connected to the realities of death.

Your book is often vividly gruesome—and just as often very funny. What do you think is the source of your “gallows humor”?
My parents are both very clever people. I grew up around humor. It just made sense to apply it to conversations about death and mortality. Especially since these heavy topics can often be easier to take in if they’re delivered with a lighter touch.

You write that the day-to-day realities of working in a crematorium “were more savage than I had anticipated.” What surprised you most in your first days at the crematory?
The bodies were savage, in the sense that I had never seen so many corpses in one place. But the real savagery was that the corpses were essentially abandoned. Our funeral home came to pick them up and take them away from their families and store them in a giant freezer. I was the only person there when the bodies were cremated. Most people have no idea they can be much more involved in the death care of the people they love.

Your obsession with death began when you were 8 years old and saw a child plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall. Working in the mortuary seems to have brought some resolution to your obsession. Was writing the book also cathartic in some way?
Absolutely. Part of writing the book was to let other people know that we’re all obsessed with death, to a degree. Death is the human condition, and it’s perfectly OK to be fascinated by it, perfectly OK to want information about what goes on behind the scenes. It’s not morbid, or deviant, or wrong. In a way, writing the book helped me to fully embrace that idea as well.

You’re critical of the modern American funeral industry. But you are also critical of Jessica Mitford’s landmark exposé of funeral home practices, The American Way of Death (1963). What’s your beef with Mitford’s book?
I try to make it clear that I have a great deal of respect for what Mitford did. However, I think she was so focused on subverting the old men of the traditional funeral industry that the book ended up being pro-direct cremation. Direct cremation (cremation with no services of any kind) is the cheapest alternative, but it doesn’t allow for something I believe we need, which is to care for and interact with our dead bodies. To have the body just disappear can hurt the grieving process.

You’re on a kind of mission in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Why is it so important that people have a closer connection with death?
I am on a mission! I would never claim to be an objective reporter. Death affects everything we do as humans, and we’re much healthier when we understand this. Other than television and film, we never see death any more, it’s not a part of our daily lives. We view this as “progress” but I don’t believe it is. We need the reality of death to remind us that we are not immortal, and our actions have real consequences.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.