Ruth: A Beautiful Dismantling
Ruth: A Beautiful Dismantling is a memoir, which delves into themes of family, love, mortality, grief, memory, and the power of story as a unifying tie between all of humanity.
With a century of Southern storytelling dying with Ruth Weaver, a victim of Alzheimer’s, David races to collect her Depression-era tales of Paw Creek, North Carolina. Yet more than mere memories, David discovers a doctrine that challenges his views on the human experience and defines his beliefs on life, death, and the immortality of story. y. Centered on the past century of a Southern family, the work examines a woman’s 90-year life from a Depression-era cotton farm to a modern Southern city eventually attempting to conceptualize “story” as the unifying string of human experience:
“When the days grow shallow, all we have are the memories, the stories that remain scattered like seed, the tales that bind us in this world. We can retell them, gather the remnants of souls that have exploded into the infinite, piece the shattered bits back to form, and breathe life into the ones we’ve loved and lost. As we stare into the oblivion and slowly fade from the familiar, those stories will be the faces that surround us and the voices we hear when we too come to pass. We all become tales.”
Thomas Rain Crowe, author of the award-winning memoir Zoro’s Field, had this to say about the work: "In this autobiographical collection of stories that focus on his copperhead-killing, Harley-riding Granny, Ruth, and her cloudy bifocals and rural Southern wisdom and wit, David Joy has provided us with a time-machine that takes us right back to the Bisquick and Bacos era in Paw Creek—smelling like Jergen’s lotion, tasting like Cheerwine, sounding like silverware rattling in kitchen cabinet drawers, and looking like a wagon wheel quilt. In this time-warp tribute and compassionate memoir, the author’s granny and all her family, friends and neighbors come alive on these pages and we are embraced in their hospitality (“like honeysuckle hugging a dogwood”), in their company, in their trials and tribulations, and in their joy."