Pig Boy's Wicked Bird: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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Description

This gritty tragicomic memoir is set in one memorable year - 1976, the Bicentennial, when Jimmy Carter ran for president and seven-year-old Doug Crandell lost two fingers in a farming accident. More than anything, Doug wants to shed his nickname, Pig Boy, and grow up to be a hog man like his father. His older brother Derrick reads pulp novels to him each night as he soaks his remaining fingers in Epsom salts. His brothers urge him to "flip the Wicked Bird" any time another child makes fun of his "lobster-red hand." Doug shares his summer of healing in Wabash, Indiana, with humans and animals who've suffered life-changing traumas: a brutal grandfather gentled by stroke, a deaf dog with a deadly taste for pig's ears, a tough-love mother coping with depression, a bevy of runt piglets saved from extermination. This is a story of love, loss, healing, and a family's relation with the land they love and know that they will lose.

Reviews

"A memoir so endearing that one hates to see it end." -- VOYA. "Crandell delightfully details lighter times." -- The Oregonian. "Inspirational because of its gritty reality." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune. "Alternately funny and tender ... Crandell writes with a novelist's flair." -- Booklist. "Has the drama, lyricism and thematic development of a work of art." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Author Bio

Doug Crandell is a widely published writer. He is the recipient of a Sherwood Anderson Writers Grant and a winner of the Night Train Firebox, Pig Iron Malt, River City, and other fiction contests. He lives in Smyrna, Georgia.