Favorite new fact of the day; bigamy is so common that many churches have smelling salts on hand to revive the widow when another wife walks in the door.

We learned this via Michelle Norrs’s interview with Tayari Jones about her novel, Silver Sparrow (Algonquin, 5/24; Audio, Audiogo; Large Print, Thorndike) on NPR’s All Things Considered.

The book, opens with the words, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.” Norris asks if the story is based on Jones’s own life. She’s gotten that question a lot, says Jones, noting. “It’s funny, when it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.” And, no, he is not a bigamist, but Jones uses the story of two separate families to explore how a father can be a different person to each of his children.

The book, which had early buzz on GalleyChat, is also the #1 pick on  the June Indie Next list.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2011 at 7:31 am and is filed under 2011 - Summer, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.