Unsurprisingly, other writers have lined up behind the book, as well: “Gilmore is not afraid to show us the two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance of change,” says Darnell Arnoult, and Bloodroot author Amy Greene read the book “all in one sitting, swept up in Bezellia’s remarkable life and her moving quest to be loved in the right way.” Though its frothy cover suggests a light summer read, in fact The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove “winds through some of the South’s darkest woods-race, class, insanity,” as novelist Lee Smith notes. Coming of age in a house where a deeply unhappy, alcoholic mother terrorizes not only the servants but her own children, Bezellia struggles to find a way to live in a world where her sole reliable sources of love are the people who are paid to care for her. The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove tells the story of a daughter of privilege-who grows up on what’s left of an antebellum plantation where thoroughbred horses were once raised-at a time of profound social change. It wasn’t until Gilmore returned to Nashville that she turned a novelist’s eye on her own hometown. Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen was a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award Nominee that year. NPR’s Alan Cheuse called the book a “stand out” coming of age novel. Her first novel, 2009’s Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, is set in rural Georgia in the kind of small town Gilmore’s paternal grandparents lived in and where Gilmore spent the summers of her youth. In between, she earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Texas, worked as a newspaper reporter-including stints at the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Chattanooga News-Free Press-and raised three daughters.

Susan Gregg Gilmore was born in Nashville in 1961, left after high school to attend the University of Virginia, and didn’t move back home until thirty years later.

The improper life of bezellia grove