Books

The uninitiated might view the Pulpwood Queens of East Texas as latter-day, sweetly honorific versions of Mississippi's Sweet Potato Queens.

But while the throngs of each queendom's supporters do bear similarities – particularly in fashion taste, which runs to tiaras, anything in hot pink and Way Big Hair – the SPQs live merely to party, and they're proud of it.

The Pulpwood Queens, on the other hand, live to party and read. Which makes them literary, and worthy of a book-lover's attention, tiaras and all.

Kathy L. Patrick started the Pulpwood Queens several years ago as a book-club offshoot of her store, Beauty and the Book, in Jefferson. As far as she knows, it's the world's only combo bookstore-beauty salon, where you get your bouffant hairdo, your manicure and your recommended reading, all in one setting.

The Pulpwood Queens soon had chapters all over the world. They also host an annual Girlfriend Weekend in Jefferson – this year's is set for Thursday-Saturday, with authors from the decidedly literary (Laura Moriarty) to the eyebrow-raising (Adrienne Barbeau) in attendance.

Now Ms. Patrick has added her own (hot pink, of course) book to the memoir pantheon. The Pulpwood Queens' Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life won't win Ms. Patrick any Pulitzers, but it is a hoot. You get the feeling she wrote it just like she talks: full of enthusiasm, completely unedited, infectiously endearing while at the same time slightly annoying.

In the book, she comes across as someone who might need to be medicated, but in this case that's a good thing. Ms. Patrick's sheer zeal for her subjects – the power of inner and outer beauty, the transformative bliss of good books – makes it nigh on impossible to resist her.

Her writing is scattershot, at best, with life vignettes woven in among random quotes (sometimes uncredited, sometimes miscredited, frequently unrelated to the material around them), recipes and recommended reading lists. She has a talent for dropping in intriguing detail, but then takes another chapter or two before she explains it, as when she casually mentions her grandfather Dirt and grandmother Mudd.

She gives her daddy credit for telling her, "Never judge a man by the color of his skin, only by the content of his character." I suspect Daddy was a fan of Martin Luther King Jr., from whose "I Have a Dream" speech that sentiment is taken, without acknowledgment.

But just when you're about to overdose from the fluff and sugarcoated "isn't life fab?" tone of it all, Ms. Patrick turns around and makes a particularly cogent point, quoting from I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, or talking about how much she adores Willie Morris.

Her reading lists are dead-on perfection, favoring Southern authors such as Mr. Morris, Connie May Fowler, Rebecca Wells, Harper Lee, Mark Childress, Allan Gurganus: nary a dud among them. Her book summaries also border on genius.

For Joyce McDonald's Comfort Creek, Ms. Patrick writes: "Mama has run off to become a country singer, Daddy has lost his job, and eleven-year-old Quinn and her sisters are living in a swamp without water and electricity. Need I say more?"

Well, no, Kathy, you needn't. I'm there.

Kathy L. Patrick

(Grand Central Publishing, $13.99)

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