Questions of identity and abandonment haunt the linked stories that make up Janet Holloway’s Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do. In writing at once intimate and sweeping, Holloway sketches the saga of a twentieth-century Appalachian family. At the book’s heart lie three generations of women, richly rendered in Holloway’s spot-on dialogue and closely observed detail. Billie, the matriarch, knows all the secrets and calls the shots, as she capably runs a string of businesses across several states. A bold and unrepentant moonshiner, Billie runs whiskey to Chicago in the 1920s (for which she eventually serves jail time), keeps a farm going in Virginia, and owns the Pioneer Beer Garden in the heart of Hatfield country in West Virginia. Bess, her adopted daughter, an unstable beauty unsure of who she is, continually tries to escape her roles as wife and mother. And Janet, Bess’s child, helpless in the currents of her parents’ needs, tries to make sense of the lives around her. Both vulnerable and strong-minded, she finds her anchor in Billie’s “unrestrained yet tough love.”

A Willful Child, vividly portrays a remarkable yet ordinary family whose life is more typical of post-war America than we’d like to think. At the mercy of an unstable, beautiful mother and a coal miner father in the boom-and-bust mountain economy, Holloway’s childhood is spent on the move from coal camp, to her granny’s beer garden, to a farm in southwest Virginia, to both coasts of Florida, and back to the mountains. Billie Brown, her pragmatic bootlegging granny, supplies rootedness, but cannot assuage her own daughter’s restless discontent or shore up the headstrong streak that will become her granddaughter’s greatest strength. A Willful Child shows us how a girl-becoming-a-woman gathers courage, confidence, and wisdom to weave a self from the pieces and places of a fragmented life.

Like Forrest Gump, the narrator of Leaving gives you a roller coaster ride into pivotal social events of the Sixties and Seventies – the beginnings of the civil rights struggle in New York and Detroit; the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King; the women’s movement. She struggles with the prescribed roles for women and good girls long before there were words for what was happening. She’s a risk taker: leaving a small town in West Virginia for New York City; leaving a first marriage to go out on her own; surviving a mental breakdown; facing her second husband’s homosexuality; and again, leaving to build a life that comes from within.