Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Annelie Geissler
Categories

LOW COUNTRY

J. Nicole Jones

A Southern Memoir

The Glass Castle meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this incandescent debut memoir of one family's changing fortunes in the Low Country of South Carolina, a tale inseparable from the region's storms and shipwrecks, ghosts and folklore.
J. Nicole Jones is the only daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, a family that grew rich building the hotels and seafood restaurants that draw tourists to Myrtle Beach. But at home, she is surrounded by violence and capriciousness: a grandfather who beats his wife, a barman father who dreams of being a country music star. At one time, Jones's parents can barely afford groceries; at another, her volatile grandfather presents her with a fur coat. After a girlhood of extreme wealth and deep debt, of ghosts and folklore, of cruel men, Jones finds herself face-to-face with an explosive possibility concerning her long-abused grandmother that she can neither speak nor shake. And through the lens of her own family's catastrophes and triumphs, Jones pays homage to the landscapes and legends of her childhood home, a region haunted by its history, where Eliza Pinckney cultivates indigo, Blackbeard ransacks the coast, and the Gray Man paces the beach, warning of Hurricane Hazel. J. Nicole Jones received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University, and has since held editorial positions at VICE magazine and Vanity Fair. Her viral essay defending the art of memoir, "Why's Everyone So Down on the Memoir?" was published by the Los Angeles Review of Books and Salon, and her reviews and other writings have appeared in magazines including Harper's. She grew up in South Carolina, and now lives in Brooklyn and Tennessee.
Available products
Book

Published 2021-04-13 by Catapult

Comments

Low Country is essential reading for anyone who has ever felt in-between or grappled with multiple truths about their homeland. J. Nicole Jones loves and indicts the rich and unique South Carolina culture that made her, offering a portrait of an American region that produces a double bind familiar to many: impossible to stay, impossible to leave.

Jones's gift for spinning a tale is readily apparent, and her intertwining the history of the Low country with her own familial history gives the book depth. A haunting memoir with poetic prose that will appeal to a large audience, owing to its interesting subject and skillful writing. Read more...

LOW COUNTRY is a Most Anticipated Book in: Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Bustle, Veranda, and Write or Die The Rumpus

Hilary Leichter Talks with the Author of Low Country Read more...

Low Country is an enthralling book, with sentences so stunning they should be memorized. Mocked by prep-school kids for talking 'like a hick' and then chided by her nana for talking 'like a Yankee,' J. Nicole Jones explores her Southern roots, her attempts to leave them, and her return. Her writing about betrayals and love (there is so much love) - bound with stories of ghostly land and seascapesis brilliant.

A Southern song of love and loss rendered in language both gossamer and precise, Low Country is what happens when one family's dreams, gossip and ghost stories meet the only writer capable of weaving them together. Harrowing, beautiful and bold, the music of this memoir lingers long beyond the last page.

Ghosts and legends swirl in an affecting family memoir... A captivating debut... [Jones'] confidential asides to readers create a genuine sense of intimacy. Lyrical prose graces a deftly crafted narrative. Read more...

As ex-pat Southerners often tend to do, Jones looks homeward in this lyrical, evocative memoir that explores her family's volatile past filled with violence and financial highs and lows, set against a landscape haunted, literally and figuratively, by its history. Read more...

Author's essay: The Doomed, Would-Be Celebrity Paradise That Still Haunts Myrtle Beach Read more...

From horse thieves to hurricanes, from shattered Southern myths to fractured family ties, from Nashville to Myrtle Beach to Miami, Low Country is a lyrical, devastating, fiercely original memoir. It's a fever dream from which you will not want to be awakened and one hell of a debut book.

Jones provides a brilliant look into the cracks of a family, channeling the folktales and sayings from her ancestors, and bringing them to the page. Read more...

The folklore element of the book, be it through the stories of Jones' grandmother or the ghost stories, revolve around the often silenced women of history. Read more...

LOW COUNTRY has been named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Bustle, and more. It is also a GMA's April book pick and Bustle Best New Book.

You can (virtually) "Meet the Author" via Nicole's video introduction to her work Read more...

It has everything you want in a good Southern memoir: ghostly gothic shit, terrifying weather, and a family that acts wilder'n hell, by god. Read more...

Jones finds her form by swirling together the world of her family's lore with the legend-heavy history of her South Carolina homeland, never resting too comfortably from any fixed position. Animated by equal measures of rigorous self-awareness and ample respect for mystery, Low Country becomes an engrossing, harrowing read. Read more...

Low Country transported me into a corner of the South, the gleaming shores of the Carolinas, that I know well. But every sentence Jones spun made a familiar place new again. This is a beautiful seance that brings family ghosts back to life and tells not just the story of a country music-singing, Myrtle Beach-famous lineage but of an entire region. A big-hearted book. I didn't want it to end.

Zibby is joined by fellow memoir enthusiast J. Nicole Jones to discuss her upcoming memoir... Read more...

I spoke with J. Nicole Jones on the Debutiful podcast about memoirs, her childhood, and what makes creative nonfiction so special... Read more...