The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
"Norma Watkins takes her readers through one woman's journey toward understanding herself and the Mississippi in which she grew up.  It is a soul-searching work, one with which many women will identify."--Kay Mills"What a book!  What a woman!  And what a life she has led...touching upon all the major issues of our time.  I was riveted from start to finish.  Brave, honest, and open, Norma Watkins is a born writer through and through.The Last Resortis an absolute must-read for all southern women--and men, too--as she shines a light into some of the darkest, most secret and sacred areas of our culture.  This is one of the best memoirs I have ever read."--Lee SmithThe Last Resortreminded me of why I started reading in the first place--to be enchanted, to be carried away from my world and dropped into a world more vivid and incandescent.  Norma Watkins casts her spell with exquisite sentences and unerring evocative details.  She is a writer of inordinate compassion and formidable intelligence.  This unsparing and unsentimental memoir documents a woman's struggle for independence over the course of her lifetime and took great moral courage and ferocious honesty to write.  And let me add that this book is so much more than personal memoir.  It is an eye on history.  Norma Watkins puts us there at the white hot center of the struggle for racial equality in Jackson, Mississippi, in the turbulent fifties and sixties."--John DufresneNorma Watkins, a rare, brave, and entrancing human being, has written a uniquely Mississippi story about coming to terms with family, state, and tumultuous times--and discovering herself in the process.  It is a great read, pure and simple."--Hodding Carter III"...this is a tale, first, of an enchanted childhood, then a murky drama of marriage and adultery, all played out against a background of bitter American struggle. I found it splendid in every way."---Carolyn See,The Washington Post