Black Lipstick and Chevy Pickups

Growing up bookish in a region where a quarter of the population can't read was defining. It meant getting teased by other kids when they saw me with a book. It meant making other kids defensive and angry when I used words they didn't know. It meant exhausting the public library's collection of children's literature by the time I was eight, and it also meant developing a pretty chronic superiority complex when it came to anybody who wasn't as obsessed with reading as I was.


So I was a nerd. A pasty, stringy homeschooled nerd with an overbite. My clothing came from church rummage sales and the local Seventh-Day Adventist mission. Every week at church I wondered if the dress I was wearing had been one of my classmates' cast-offs the year before.


This was Bible Belt fundamentalism in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the fashion among poor homeschooled Bible Belt fundamentalists was cotton floral prairie dresses. I wore old lady shoes: flats with buckles and bows on the toes. My glasses were thick bifocals in huge plastic frames (my paranoid schizophrenic father was convinced that metal frames would attract mind-altering radio signals). There was one year that involved a perm. It was everything you could imagine from a perm on an eight-year-old Appalachian child in 1991. When I was 10 or so my grandmother took me to the Sears in Chattanooga and bought me my first article of brand-new, never-before-worn outerwear: a denim dress with ribbon flowers on the yoke.