Be Sweet

My mother loved me to pieces, as she often said, writes Roy Blount Jr., "and I'm still trying to pick up the pieces." In the book his readers have been waiting for, our generation's master of full-hearted humor lays open the soul of his life story. Blount—Georgia boy, New York wit, lover of baseball and interesting women, bumbling adventurer, salty-limerick virtuoso, and impassioned father—journeys into his past, and his psyche (and also to China, Manhattan, and sixty feet underwater) in search of the answers to three riddles that have haunted his life: one, the riddle of "the family curse"; two, the riddle of what drives him, or anyone, to be funny; and three, the riddle of what so cruelly tangled his bond to the beguiling orphan girl who became the impossible mother who raised him to Be Sweet. Sardonic and sentimental, hilarious and grieving, brazen and bashful, tough and tender, honest and wayward, Be Sweet resonates with the complex but bouncy chords of a whole man singing, clinkers and all.