Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True
    Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True
    Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True
    Audiobook4 hours

    Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True

    Written by Tony Earley

    Narrated by Tony Earley

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In Somehow Form a Family, Earley writes about finding a place in a world without losing sight of where you came from.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 15, 2007
    ISBN9781598874464
    Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True

    Related to Somehow Form a Family

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Remains

      Sep 1, 2017

      THIS IS what you think your mother’s remains will look like. The ash will be black, like all that soot in the fireplace. It will be heavy, like wet sand. There will not be too much of it. It will fit in a small urn with intricate designs on the borde

      6 min read

    • Article

      Endless Work

      Aug 18, 2021

      MY MOTHER comes from a family of restless activity lovers. Her dad built stone walls and took daylong bike rides well into his seventies; his brother Leon, meanwhile, tried to retire but hated it so much he launched a whole second career. My father c

      10 min read

    • Article

      Hammocks, Fireflies, And The 10 Best Books Of June

      Jun 8, 2021

      June’s long days provide plenty of time for reading alfresco. Let our reviewers’ suggestions guide your choices of the 10 best books to savor.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      Sisterly Significance

      Feb 24, 2020

      Sisterly Significance
      8 min read

    • Article

      Birds Of Paradise

      Apr 19, 2022

      Birds Of Paradise
      5 min read

    • Article

      Joshua Ferris Writes a Work of Hope

      Aug 2, 2021

      This was always going to be about Joshua Ferris’s dad. “You catch me pretty fresh,” the author deadpans over Zoom. “I haven’t talked about it.” The “it” refers to his long-awaited new novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, which publishes in September.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Goodbye to All That

      Dec 2, 2018

      Goodbye to All That
      10 min read

    • Article

      Back Draft: Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

      Jul 23, 2021

      The fiction writer discusses Native art, breakup phone calls, and the line between politics and propaganda.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2022

      Nothing is as important to our ability to survive as our ability to hurt. -Haider Warraich, The Song of Our Scars, 2022 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -William Blake, T

      4 min read

    • Article

      Word By Word

      Nov 28, 2018

      Word By Word
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Soundtrack Of My Life

      Jul 23, 2019

      The Soundtrack Of My Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Making A Hummingbird Of Words

      Aug 17, 2017

      BETH ANN FENNELLY, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables; a book of nonfiction, Great with Child; and The Til

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Time Is Now

      Aug 18, 2021

      Suggested Reading: What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August) by Alice McDermott The author of eight novels, three of which were named Pulitzer Prize finalists, including Charming Billy, which won the

      2 min read

    • Article

      Page One

      Oct 12, 2022

      “My cousin Galaxy’s baby fell out of a two-story window and survived.” A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents (Ecco, November 2022) by Mary-Alice Daniel. First book, memoir. Agent: Jin Auh. Editor: Gabriella Doob. Publ

      2 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Shipstead, Ryan, Walker, and More

      May 17, 2022

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from Maggie Shipstead, Eimer Ryan, Sarai Walker, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millio

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Somehow Form a Family

    4/5

    26 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I recently discovered this author via The New Yorker podcast where he read his short story, The Backpack which was truly incredible - the kind of prose I live to read/listen to. The only thing keeping this book from being 5 stars is the story about the cat which made me physically ill.
    • 5/5
      SOMEHOW FORM A FAMILY, by Tony Earley.Having read Tony Earley's sweet and nostalgic novel, JIM THE BOY, I was not prepared for the darker content of these autobiographical essays about his less than happy childhood and the bouts of clinical depression that have plagued him periodically as a teen and adult. The title of this 2001 collection of "Stories that Are Mostly True" is an ironic nod to a line from THE BRADY BUNCH theme song. Growing up in the 60s and 70s in a small town in North Carolina, Earley remembers not just the pervasive influence of television and shows like The Brady Bunch, Gomer Pyle and Gilligan's Island, but also shares bitter and confused memories of the discord between his parents and his father's absences when he would move out, sometimes for months at a time. But another event which continues to haunt him is the death of his younger sister in a grisly auto accident when he was a freshman in college and she a senior in high school.Much of this is revealed in the title essay, which is perhaps the best and most affecting of the bunch. Reading it, I often found myself chuckling and wincing simultaneously But I found all of the pieces here to be provocative food for thought, as Earley examines his life - the importance of extended family and forebears ("Hallway"), the oddities of southern dialects and word usage ("The Quare Gene"), and his exposure and changing attitudes toward religion ("A Worn Path" Earley was raised Baptist, but married an Episcopalian). "The Courting Garden" offers a glimpse of that transition and how he and his wife met. The two weakest stories here were, I thought, "Ghost Stories" and "Tour de Fax." Well, actually, they are well-written and interesting enough, but didn't seem to really fit into the collection as smoothly as the other pieces did. That said, I was, for the most part, charmed by the wry, self-deprecating sense of humor that infused these 'stories,' from a young man who was/is, in many ways, "from" the country, but not "of" the country.Tony Earley is, no question, a fine writer. I enjoyed this book tremendously. Very highly recommended. (four and a half stars)
    • 5/5
      Tony Earley is a marvelous writer. Just marvelous. I love his fiction, and I loved these "personal essays" (he called them that because he couldn't think of anything better to call them). Rather than write a review, I think I'll just post a few quotes I marked. See if they don't make you want to read his stuff.From Hallway:p. 49 - I wish that with these words I could turn the hallway into perfect metaphor, an incantation that would restore everyone who ever walked its length to the person they wanted most in their best heart to be, but the fact is that the hallway is simply a space forty-one feet long, nine feet, two inches high, and just over six feet wide, through which my family has traveled for eighty-four years. Of all the facts we have gathered and stored in the hallway, this one troubles me most: stories in real life rarely end the way we want them to. They simply end.From The Quare Gene:p. 75 - And of course, no language is a static property; the life cycle of words mirrors the life cycles of the individuals who speak them. For specific words to fall out of favor and be replaced by new ones is the natural order of things; every language, given enough time, will replace each of its words, just as every population replaces the old with the young, just as every seven years the human body replaces each of its cells.From The Courting Garden:pp. 84, 85 - The unexamined life may not be worth living, but sometimes it allows you to live momentarily on planets more romantic and interesting than your own.p. 86 - Weddings, of course, have less to do with being married than with the simple fact that it is best to begin the most arduous journeys surrounded by friends and wearing nice clothes.p. 86 - At those moments we smile like spies from the same small country, on spotting the other in a foreign airport, each bearing half the secret we need for survival.From Ghost Stories:p. 111 - We are looking for ghosts, but, I think, a good story will do.And from Tour de Fax, this fascinating tidbit about racecar driver, Kyle Petty:p. 146 - Petty had read most of Elmore Leonard's Riding the Rap on the way over from New York. He was worried because he had brought along only two books for the trip. "I'm gonna have to find a store," he said. "I'm afraid I'm going to run out of stuff." He doesn't like to sit still without something to do. He collects first editions--Graham Greene, Hemingway, Eudora Welty--and reads them on airplanes.I really hope Earley writes more soon. I'm out of his books now.