The Tuscaloosa News
In these difficult times, humorists are to be treasured. We should take them hot soup, make sure they are dressed warmly.
We need them and there are too few — Roy Blount, George Singleton, Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiaasen, a few others. Paraphrasing the statement about the famous bird: humorists don’t do one thing except make jokes for us to enjoy, and Harrison Scott Key is one of the best, winning, in 2015, the James Thurber Prize for his first book, a memoir about growing up in Coldwater, Mississippi, in a complicated family with a very difficult father.
The family was complicated, he learned over time, because his mother had married Gene, who divorced her, then married aunt Faye and died, then Mom married Pop who was aunt Faye’s brother. Harrison and his brother Bird had the same mother but were also cousins. A diagram was needed.