Title: Light While There Is Light
First published: May 1993
Description: This brilliant fictional memoir of an American family begins with ghosts: the moans of the author's mother. And indeed, Waldrop's ghostly portrait of his mother and other family members is, in part, a kind of American haunting, a haunting of the mind, of dreams, of aspirations, and, most of all, of the spirit.

Born into a deeply religious family, the author and his siblings are taken by their mother across the Midwest and South as she searches for the "right" religious sect and educates them in various forms of fundamentalism, a trip that ends with the mother speaking in tongues and eventually in her total isolation.

It is not only his mother, however, but the author's brothers who are utterly transformed by her spiritual thirst. Unable to cope properly with a world of little moral values, the brothers themselves become involved in shade business operations and sham religious institutions. One brother is imprisoned for his activities.

Yet the author neither psychologizes nor preaches, nor does he judge his family. Rather, his plain, poetic prose searches out events, actions, and results as clues of their desperate quests for meaning. As American authors from Hawthorne and Poe to Faulkner and O'Connor have understood, the American experience is anything but nice and sweet. Below the surface of American family life are spooky tales of fear, madness, and destruction.

In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop explores these tales through the memories of his own life with love, understanding, and all the horror they evoke. This is a true American family classic
Subjects: Childhood and youth, American Poets, Biography, Mothers and sons, Fundamentalism