Getting Mother's Body - Susan-Lori Parks

Susan-Lori Parks acknowledges West Texas

in
VG: Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color, An International Website
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/parks_suzanlori.html

“In 2003, [Susan-Lori] Parks returned to fiction writing, publishing her first novel, Getting Mother's Body. A twist on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the novel follows the quest of a pregnant teenager who sets off with a small group of accomplices for Arizona, where she plans to exhume her mother's body in order to retrieve the jewels supposedly hidden in the coffin. She is pursued by her mother's former lover, who vows to keep her promise that the jewels remain with the body.
Parks says that the novel and its characters are grounded in the landscape of West Texas, where she had lived during her father's army days: "I love the big sky and arid landscape of that place. The characters came out of that landscape and the story came out of those characters. Then there was Faulkner's novel, which I had read eight years before" (Marshall).”