Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award
 
Patricia Foster’s lyrical yet often painful memoir explores the life of a white middle-class girl who grew up in rural south Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, a time and place that did not tolerate deviation from traditional gender roles. Her mother raised Foster and her sister as “honorary boys,” girls with the ambition of men but the temperament of women.
 
An unhappy, intelligent woman who kept a heartbreaking secret from everyone close to her, Foster's mother was driven by a repressed rage that fed her obsession for middle-class respectability. By the time Foster reached age fifteen, her efforts to reconcile the contradictory expectations that she be at once ambitious and restrained had left her nervous and needy inside even while she tried to cultivate the appearance of the model student, sister, and daughter. It was only a psychological and physical breakdown that helped her to realize that she couldn't save her driven, complicated mother and must struggle instead for both understanding and autonomy.
 

PATRICIA FOSTER is the author of Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter and a book of essays, Just Beneath My Skin. She is the editor of Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul, Sister to Sister, and co-editor of The Healing Circle and Understanding the Essay (with Jeff Porter). She has had fellowships from Yaddo and VCAA, received a Florida Arts Council Award, the Fred Bonnie Award for the novel, a Dean’s Scholar Award, and an Alabama Voices Award. She is a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa.

 

“The trouble with southern daughters and mothers is that there is precious little confession going on. Ours is a terrain of secrets and deceptions. I love the way Patricia Foster just wades into that dark and murky love-hate that keeps mothers and daughters forever mysterious to each other.”
—Nanci Kincaid, author of Crossing Blood
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“Taking a cue from James Baldwin, who found the innocence of privileged white Americans appalling, Patricia Foster has recounted her own trajectory from clueless small-town Southern girl to a hard-won loss of innocence about the reality of racism, in this stunningly written, unique and vital memoir.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction — -

“All the Lost Girls dramatizes the subtle influences of family and culture, and especially of southern culture, on a young woman's psyche. At the same time, the book carries on the southern literary tradition of creating a strong, direct voice that isn't afraid to see the humor of a situation, to artistically sketch a lush landscape, and to depict fascinating rural characters.”
—Mary Swander, author of Out of This World: A Woman's Life Among the Amish
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