How about these for opening sentences? "We should have known things were not going well when Mama found a tick doing isometrics under her panty hose." Or "Something about my mother attracts ornithologists." Or "My mother eats things she finds dead on the road." Or "I remember as a little child watching my aunt Belle's wide rump disappear into the cattails and marsh grass at the edge of a pond as she crawled on her hands and knees to meet a giant alligator face to face." Or, perhaps my favorite, "My Uncle Jimbuddy, the cabinet maker, has been cutting off pieces of his fingers for ten years now." With openings like these, how can a reader not be drawn in to find out what in the world she is talking about and how is she going to make a story of it?
Aspiring writers should study her opening lines and paragraphs to see how a great writer draws a reader in. She is a master storyteller who manages to fit whole stories into the space of a short essay. It is honest, original, entertaining and yet carries insight that can be quite biting at times. Whether written (in books such as this) or spoken (in her oral essays on NPR), I love Bailey White's voice.
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