
Through the Groves: A Memoir
⏳ Hurry! Sale ends in {timer}.
We’re not making a profit on this sale! If you have the means, please consider contributing to the Rainbow Book Bus at checkout 💕
"Anne Hull has written some of the most important stories of our time, beautifully, unflinchingly."
--Rick Bragg
A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father's family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. "Look now," her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. "It will all be gone." But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.
Here, Hull captures it all--the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women.
Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who's ever left home to cut a path of their own.
[Hull] has that sly eye for sublime details, but also a killer instinct for tight storytelling...Through the Groves isn’t just another lament about a ruined paradise. Hull’s time-stamp of Florida is the muggy, buggy, sun-beaten setting for a girl struggling first for a social toehold, then for a way out.”
―Carl Hiaasen, New York Times Book Review
“Hull is such a discerning reporter of her own past. She fills page after page here with the kind of small, charged and often wry details that make a lost world come alive...”
―Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Through the Groves joins a growing body of powerful queer Florida lit. This coming-out and coming-of-age memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull is a moving portrait of queer adolescence in 1960s Florida.”
―Autostraddle
“Hypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us.”
―Oprah Daily
“Anne Hull's memoir takes the reader on a rattletrap, strangely private, exquisitely moving ride. Hull can remind one of Welty at times, both in her humor (subtle, wild, forgiving) and her disarmingly skillful prose. Yet Hull is zanier and sexier than Welty, and there is also an erotic coming- of-age story discreetly embedded in this book.”
―Terry Castle, author of The Professor and Other Writings
About the Author
Anne Hull is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent nearly two decades as a reporter at the Washington Post. She is a fifth-generation Floridian who started her newspaper career at the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times). She lives in Washington, DC.
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Pub date: June 20, 2023
Length: 224 pages
Format: Hardcover