Southern Girls with Big Vocabularies, (Paperback)

"There seemed to be almost a conspiracy of Southern female writers to render the cult of friendship between women of the South invincible and unassailable. Where were the books about what happened when the sisterhood failed? Were there no stories about the times it all went terribly, horribly wrong?" - Chapter 10, Southern Girls with Big Vocabularies Della, Tessa, Lelia and Bea were best friends from kindergarten or first grade until their senior year of high school. But "eleven years, seven months, seventeen days" before Tessa's thirtieth birthday, something terrible happened. On Tessa's thirtieth birthday, she receives a call from Bea asking Tessa to do the one thing she has dreaded most... come home. Set primarily in Richmond, Virginia, this coming of age story spans 25 years of pop-culture references, conflicts of Catholic sex-ed, and meditations on misery, as it alternates between the story of four childhood friends unknowingly headed toward tragedy, and portraits of the women they become.