Scribner announces publication of fierce, a memoir by Barbara Robinette Moss..

From the award-winning author of Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter comes this compelling memoir about a single mother determined to break the patterns she has been taught.

Barbara Robinette Moss grew up in the red clay hills of Alabama, the fourth of eight children, in a childhood defined by close sibling alliances, a charismatic, alcoholic father, an artistic mother, and staggering poverty. In fierce, Moss looks at what happens when the child of such a family grows up. At once poetic and plainspoken, Moss (a “powerful writer” - - Chicago Tribune) paints a vivid, moving portrait of her persistent quest to reinvent her life and rebel against the indigence, addiction, and broken-down dreams she inherited from her parents. With warmth, insight and candor, Moss tells the poignant story of finally leaving everything she knew in Alabama to fulfill her ambition to become an artist. It is an odyssey filled with gritty improvisation (taking her son Jason to her night job to sleep on the floor), bittersweet pragmatism (on a date, filling her purse with shrimp, rolls, and even a doily, to take home to a waiting eight-year-old), and staunch conviction and pride (chasing a mail carrier down the street to defend her use of food stamps). As with many children of alcoholics, the legacy of her father’s alcoholism catches up with Moss, and an abusive relationship – an addiction of its own sort – threatens to destroy all she has accomplished. But as Moss learns to cope with her anger and pain, it is parenthood that helps her discover true strength. Ultimately, fierce is a warm, honest and triumphant story from a writer celebrated for her Southern lyricism, about a woman determined to make it on her own – to shrug off the handicaps of her childhood and raise her own son responsibly and well.

Scribner announces the publication of Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter by Barbara Robinette Moss.

The brilliant new memoir about growing up poor and undaunted in the South. With an unflinching voice, Ms. Moss chronicles her family’s chaotic impoverished survival in the red-clay hills of Alabama. A wild-eyed alcoholic father and a humble yet heroic mother along with a shanty full of children fill her life to the brim with story after story that is at once gripping, horrific, tender, loving and uproariously funny.

Woven through Ms. Moss’s flowing prose is ample evidence of her mother’s legacy to her: the love of inner beauty—especially in the form of poetry, music and painting. Ms. Moss and her brothers and sisters are lifted toward survival, and finally rebirth, on the wings of Art. The young Ms. Moss’s fascination with painting coincides with her desire to transform her ill-formed face, and also her health—ruined through the ravages of poverty and neglect. Against all odds, the image of herself—the way she always felt at heart—surfaces at late in her physical well-being as she learns to believe in the beauty she brings forth from inside. The struggle it took to put each syllable down makes the work she created burn with intensity and truth. Ms. Moss has not only survived in a hostile world, she has gloriously re-imagined herself through it. Although today she is an accomplished visual artist, this book is the masterpiece she has waited for her life to paint.

The first chapter of Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter won the Faulkner Gold medal for Personal Essay in 1996. Jack Davis, of the Chicago Tribune Company and a juror for the Pulitzer Prize, judged the essay competition. He wrote:

"Near the Center of the Earth" describes a woman in a state of controlled desperation as she successively exhausts the means to keep her seven young children from hunger after her husband has left. The opening and climatic scene where the mother tests the meal she’s made form the seed corn to learn if the pesticide coating is till dangerous is lucid, believable and dramatic. The rage and inadequacy of the missing father is conveyed in impressions—the uprooted inedible lilies, the apologetic sheriff’s visit. All the dynamics of a family’s history are encapsulated in the account of a summer’s hardship.