Community in Bobbie Ann Mason’s War Fiction

Abstract

In 1999, Bobbie Ann Mason published a memoir entitled, Clear Springs, which recounts her journey from farm girl to young academic to prize-winning fiction writer. The book also treats the lives of myriad family members, who, like she, are products of the Jackson Purchase area of Kentucky. One passage of this text leaps off the page, not only on account of its dramatic articulation, but also because of how it situates itself relative to Mason’s fiction. This passage arises as part of Mason’s description of her early girlhood, when her mother and father, Christy and Wilburn Mason, respectively, lived with Mason’s paternal grandparents. Mason refers to this passage as constituting a “significant scene” of her childhood, but she also states, “I have no memory of it” (39).

The soldiers we sent to Vietnam were not the only ones who went. We were all there. And we had a long journey to make together to get back home.

—Mason, Clear Springs: A Memoir (181)