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Through the Groves

A Memoir

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Through the Groves

By: Anne Hull
Narrated by: Anne Hull
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About this listen

This program is read by the author.

“Anne Hull has written some of the most important stories of our time, beautifully, unflinchingly.”—Rick Bragg

"Hull delivers her book with a gentle twang and the unpretentious tone of someone who has lived the experiences she describes. Through her character work and emotionally intelligent delivery, Hull helps the listener feel her every bump, bruise, and triumph."—AudioFile

A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father’s family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. “Look now,” her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. “It will all be gone.” But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.

Here, Hull captures it all—the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women.

Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who’s ever left home to cut a path of their own.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

©2022 Anne Hull (P)2022 Macmillan Audio
Authors Biographies & Memoirs

Critic Reviews

“This warmly evocative recollection of [Hull's] formative years will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who enjoy understated, stylishly well-told stories....a funny, candid, and authentic memoir.”Kirkus

“[An] entrancing coming-out and coming-of-age memoir...[Hull] paints a masterful, full-fleshed portrait of the Florida of her youth...this is a stirring account of growing up at odds with one’s environment and making it out on the other side.”Publishers Weekly

“Honest, tender, wistful, Through The Groves is a clear-eyed evocation of a very particular time and place and people. It’s also a gut-punch of a story about a childhood filled with uncertainty, questions, longing. This feels like the book Anne Hull has been wanting to write, needing to write, and also maybe the book she felt a little afraid to write, which are the perfect conditions for a heart-rending memoir. I’ve long admired Hull as a journalist, but I turned the last page feeling she was a friend.”—J. R. Moehringer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tender Bar

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