The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them
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Five years ago, after an exhaustive countrywide search, the Chicago Tribune announced Amy Dickinson as the next Ann Landers. They wanted a contemporary voice and they found it. Bracingly witty and honest, Amy's voice is more Nora Ephron than Dear Abby. Readers love her for her brutal honesty, her small-town values, and for the fact that her motto is "I make the mistakes so you don't have to." Her advice column, "Ask Amy," appears daily in more than 150 newspapers nationwide, read by more than 22 million readers. In The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson takes those mistakes and spins them into a remarkable story. This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the women in her family who helped raise them after Amy's husband abruptly left. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates and adult education classes, travels across country with her daughter and their giant tabby cat, and tries to come to terms with the family's aptitude for "dorkitude." Though they live in London, D.C., and Chicago, all roads lead them back to her original hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny upstate village where Amy's family has tilled and cultivated the land, tended chickens and Holsteins, and built houses and backyard sheds for over 200 years. Most important though, her family has made more family there, and they all still live in a ten-house radius of each other. With kindness and razor-sharp wit, they welcome Amy and her daughter back weekend after weekend, summer after summer, offering a moving testament to the many women who have led small lives of great consequence in a tiny place. About the Author AMY DICKINSON is the author of the syndicated advice column "Ask Amy," which appears in more than 150 newspapers nationwide, and the host of a biweekly feature on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." Formerly a columnist for Time magazine, she lives in Chicago. The Barnes & Noble Review Out of all the reasons to recommend a book to a friend, my motivation is rarely "This might help." But twice now, since reading Amy Dickinson's memoir The Mighty Queens of Freeville, I've passed it on in precisely that spirit. In one case, I thought a city-dwelling friend of mine, who's lately missed the small midwestern town she grew up in, might find comfort in Dickinson's loving description of her own rural hometown in upstate New York. In the other, a mother of three very young children revealed that her husband (the rat) had recently left her for another woman; I hoped she might find some salve in Dickinson's survival under similar circumstances.
Acknowledgments 9Introduction 131 Don't Throw Your Ring in the Creek: Surviving the Breakup 252 Tea Alone: On Mothering without a Net 463 Ex Marks the Spot: Separating in a Time of Togetherness 684 Nothing's Too Much Trouble 925 Making Peanut Jesus: Finding God in the Community of Faith and Casseroles 1126 Livestock in the Kitchen: The Many Uses of Cats 1327 Failing Up 1608 Playing Hearts: Dating in the Age of Dread 1819 The Apex of Dorkitude: Dork, Like Me 20210 The Marrying Man 21711 This Too Shall Pass 24712 I'll Fly Away 266
