This little book went on to become a best seller and was adapted first as a movie (starring Olivia de Havilland) and, much later, as a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical.
Spencer, who moved to Chapel Hill in the 1980s, wrote much more than “Piazza,” of course, and she kept writing – well into an age when most of her contemporaries have retired to the Barcalounger.
At 92, Spencer has brought forth a collection of nine luminous short stories, all published within the past decade. While not exactly avant-garde, her fiction is tight and gem-like, and it shows an author at the height of her considerable powers.
Spencer writes about the new, suburbanized South. Most of her characters are white, middle-aged (often, with children in college) and fairly middle-class. One is a medical researcher, another is a congressional aide but most seem to gravitate toward insurance.
Their religious preferences gravitate toward Presbyterian or Episcopalian – “the sort of religion that went with the wine and the candlelight.”
In most of their pasts, though, lies a family Big House where they spent riotous summers in their youth or childhood, and where elderly female relatives still reside amid stately decay. And, off in the woods, there still are
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