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“I keep my friends’ books on my dining room shelves so I can pull them out and brag about them to other friends at dinner.”

How do you organize your books?

I keep my friends’ books on my dining room shelves so I can pull them out and brag about them to other friends at dinner. In my home office—my grown child’s former bedroom—I organize all the nonfiction books I read for research by category: economics/globalization, race and history, addiction. The novels spread beyond the other rooms in our house; not only on shelves, but I also stack them under the lamps for optimal lighting.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

At my first daily newspaper job in Savannah, Ga. I sometimes wrote food features, and someone gave me Laurie Colwin’s “Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen.” I loved that Colwin wasn’t a snob – she shopped yard sales for her cooking – and she taught you how to cook without making you feel stupid. The tomato pie recipe remains an obvious go-to.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

Food has always been the Macy family’s love language. “James and the Giant Peach” had me drooling, and the escapades of “Homer Price”—also a native Ohioan—had my first donut. Louise Fitzhugh’s “Harriet the Spy” was the first non-food book I devoured anyway. I used to hide in a giant lilac grove down the street and take notes on passers-by à la Harriet. My husband and I drove past the old house recently and I couldn’t believe how small the “grove” looked – a couple of bushes, barely four feet wide.

My parents never bought books, but they were big library patrons – my late mother refused to buy my books, because why buy them when you can get them for free at the library? (I gave her copies, of course. On the same subject : Ector District Library ready to sell books.) “Tom Sawyer,” “Charlotte’s Web,” “The Catcher in the Rye” were all formative books—contradictory stories are delicious.

How have your reading tastes changed over time?

Pretty sure they’ve only gotten better. My senior year of high school, I found Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” in my hometown library. I’m not religious, but I seriously needed some positive thinking. To see also : Use of technology for cultivation in temperate climates. That book and a tutor who helped me apply for Pell Grants and other need-based financial aid gave me the courage to go to college when no one else in my family had. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I copied down quotes from Peale’s book on colored construction paper which I taped to the bedroom walls.

My college roommate introduced me to serious journalism with her dorm room subscriptions to Harper’s and The Atlantic. In middle school I studied fiction—which turns out not to be my gift—but I fell in love with voice masters like Lorrie Moore (“Self-Help”), Carolyn Chute (“The Beans of Egypt, Maine”) and Dorothy Allison (“Bastard Out of Carolina”).

I love novels that take me deep into an important issue, as well as a place—books like “Mercy Street” by Jennifer Haigh, set mainly in a Boston abortion clinic; and Liz Moore’s “Long Bright River,” about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia’s Kensington. My favorite writers who explore the South, my adopted home, are S.A. Cosby, Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, Robert Gipe, Silas House, Carter Sickels and Tayari Jones.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

“Raising Lazarus,” if I may, because serious policy innovation is needed to reverse our nation’s skyrocketing death toll of despair. Although the overdose crisis is rarely a partisan issue, the toxic politics that underlie it continue to impede government response. To see also : New NUS Research Center for Sustainable Urban Farming seeks high-tech solutions to increase Singapore’s food security. I also think it would help him better understand the divide between country and city that threatens not only his re-election, but democracy itself.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Lee Smith, Kiese Laymon, and my Appalachian sensei, the novelist/illustrator Robert Gipe, who served as a consultant for our “Dopesick” TV series. I would make Smith’s mother’s recipe for Sweet Potato Ham Biscuits (with Apple Butter), from a homemade cookbook she gave me when I interviewed her 30 years ago. If you’ll allow me a fourth, I’d add North Carolinian chef-writer Vivian Howard and the food would be next level. Otherwise, Colwin’s tomato pie never disappoints. I have never met Colwin, but I would love to cook for her with my own farm sale cookware.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” makes me angry every time I think about it. Blaming Appalachian woes on a crisis of masculinity and a lack of thrift, Vance overlooked centuries of predatory behavior by out-of-state coal and pharma companies and the politicians who failed to regulate them, and he took his stereotypical false narratives to the bank. So please, please, if you take one thing away from this interview, read Elizabeth Catte’s “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” instead, and understand that in her title, you are primarily J.D. Vance.

The last book I put down without finishing was Amor Towles’ “The Lincoln Highway” – but it was not meant to be left unread. My husband, who is also a Towles fan, took it before I could finish it, then gave it to our traveling musician, youngest boy, who devoured it on tour, and who knows where it ended up? I’ve loved Towles since his first book, “Rules of Civility,” and his latest is destined to be another runner-up.

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