Through the Groves

January 1, 2023

Can you imagine growing up in an orange grove in Florida, with Disneyland being built nearby? That's what Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Hull's childhood was like, and it wasn't all happy. Even as the natural landscape fell to Disneyfication, the polarity between her sometimes dangerously dreamy father and ambitious Brooklyn-born mother made for confusion. Hull finally realized that she had to leave home, especially as her own sexuality emerged. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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April 1, 2023
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist chronicles her childhood and formative years in rural central Florida. When she was young, Hull often accompanied her father through the orange groves he tended as a fruit buyer for the juice processor HP Hood. Her schoolteacher mother had designated her the "ride-along minder" meant to "steer [her father] clear of the red neon Schlitz signs that called to him on his drive home." Before Hull's parents had settled in the town that, every spring, smelled "like God had knocked over a bottle of Ladies of Gardenia," both had dreamed of becoming writers. That dream ended when Hull's mother, unwilling to nurse her husband's "illness" any longer, took her children back and forth between Sebring and St. Petersburg as she struggled to make a life on her own. The family finally settled in "St. Pete," a city of "old people." Living in her eccentric grandmother's house among "Tibetan singing bowls [and] Guatemalan handicrafts" made Hull feel more at ease. Her mother eventually remarried, this time to a man she didn't love and who didn't appreciate "kids who talked back." The newly sober father with whom she began reconciling paid for Hull's "escape" to Florida State, where she embraced her nascent lesbianism and became a Revlon shampoo sales representative. "Being aimless and average at nineteen was excusable; at twenty-two, I was ready to grab any piece of driftwood floating by that might keep me from going under," she writes. Then a small newsroom job with the St. Petersburg Times kick-started the writing career neither of her parents chose to pursue--she went on to work for more than two decades at the Washington Post--and it began the unlikely journey that took Hull away from her multigenerational roots. This warmly evocative recollection of her formative years will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who enjoy understated, stylishly well-told stories. A funny, candid, and authentic memoir.

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April 24, 2023
Pulitzer-winning journalist Hull recounts her Florida upbringing in this entrancing coming-out and coming-of-age memoir. She begins in 1967, as her parents’ marriage crumbled along with her father’s mental health. Soon, Hull’s mother moved Hull and her siblings from the sleepy town of Sebring to St. Petersburg, where Hull vividly conjures the “apocalyptic signage” lining State Road 60, a talking mermaid display at “the World’s Most Unusual Drug Store,” the exotic clutter of her Grandma Damie’s house, and the severe nuns at her Catholic school. She paints a masterful, full-fleshed portrait of the Florida of her youth, facing down its racism by detailing the segregated “Black Sebring” neighborhood across the tracks from her childhood home that “felt like a separate town,” and unpacking her distaste for the gender expectations foisted upon her by her conservative grandma Gigi and her namesake, Aunt Anne, while Hull was still in the closet. As she recounts coming to understand her sexuality and planning her escape from Florida in the process, Hull dispatches invaluable insights into Deep South culture and Cold War–era gender politics, but they sometimes come at the expense of her personal story. Still, this is a stirring account of growing up at odds with one’s environment and making it out on the other side.

May 31, 2023
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hull shares her humble beginnings in 1960s Central Florida in this bittersweet memoir. Focusing on her memories of her large family and the way they shaped her view of the seemingly isolated world around her, Hull offers insight into tumultuous family dynamics, racism, sexism, and the struggle to discover and embrace one's identity. Vibrant details of their family-owned orange groves flow into portraits of her hardworking if conflicted father and her transplanted Brooklynite mother. Family friction is echoed in the jarring noise and disruption of the construction work nearby on Walt Disney World. Though this memoir is short and at times too quick to change focus, Hull is compelling, pairing minute details with a larger perspective. In her thoughtful account of the pain and love she experienced during her upbringing in the orange groves, Hull attains a delicate balance that is sustained as she ponders her decision to leave her first home behind and retraces her steps to the start of her illustrious career at the St. Petersburg Times.

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