FAY by Larry Brown

If I'd been born in Mississippi, this could easily have been my story too. I certainly tried to run away from home, but Fay, unlike me, was successful at it. Like Fay, I did find my way to New Orleans in the '60s.

Larry Brown's dedication page reads: "For my uncle in all ways but blood: Harry Crews."

Larry Brown is considered by an increasingly large and vocal group of admirers to be one of a small handful of great American writers working at the end of the 20th century.

Synopsis:A beautiful, naive, and good-hearted woman, 17-year-old Fay is fleeing home and her father's sexual advances, only to encounter a series of men all too willing to take care of her. As she makes her way from the woods just north of Oxford to the beaches of Biloxi, leaving bodies in her wake, Fay emerges as one of the most captivating heroines in recent fiction.

Another snyposis from the publisher about the novel FAY, by Larry Brown...

"She's had no education, hardly any shelter, and you can't call what her father's been trying to give her since she grew up 'love.' So, at the ripe age of seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home. She lights out alone, wearing her only dress and her rotting sneakers, carrying a purse with a half pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. Even in 1985 Mississippi, two dollars won't go far on the road. She's headed for the bright lights and big times and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay.

"There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pull over to pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster pilot with money for a night or two on the town. And finally there's a strip joint bouncer who deals on the side.

"At the end of this suspenseful, compulsively readable novel, there are five dead bodies stacked up in Fay's wake. Fay herself is sighted for the last time in New Orleans. She'll make it, whatever making it means, because Fay's got what it takes: beauty, a certain kind of innocent appeal, and the instinct for survival.

"Set mostly in the seedy beach bars, strip joints, and massage parlors of Biloxi, Mississippi, back before the casinos took over, Fay is a novel that only Larry Brown, the reigning king of Grit Lit, could have written. As the New York Times Book Review once put it, he's 'a writer absolutely confident of his own voice. He knows how to tell a story.'"

Fay is a novel that could only have been written by Larry Brown, whom the Boston Globe called "one of our finest writers — honest, courageous, unflinching."

Review:
"[H]is most powerful novel yet...[B]y the end the reader is mesmerized, waiting for a gun to go off, but praying for a miracle. There are no miracles, of course, but the raw power of this novel, the clear, graphic accounts of both humble and perverted lives (in the bars and strip joints of Biloxi) is a triumph of realism and a humane imagination." Publishers Weekly

Review:
"For years, Larry Brown has been known and respected as a writer's writer. But now, with Fay, this profoundly Southern novelist may win the broad readership he so richly deserves. Spellbinding." William Plummer, People

A documentary, "The Rough South of Larry Brown," premiered at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in the Spring of 2000.