Book Review: The Secret to Southern Charm

Not Yet a Fair Trade Book

Title: The Secret to Southern Charm

Author: Kristy Woodson Harvey

Date: 2018

Publisher: Gallery / Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 9781501158100

Length: 365 pages

Quote: “It had been thirty-four days since those uniformed men came to tell me my Adam was Missing in Action...and still, every time my bedroom door opened, I felt a jolting panic that someone was going to tell me he was gone.”

Sloane “fell in love” and married Adam too fast, too young. When he’s reported missing, she shuts herself in her room with her guilt (she wasn’t a perfect wife), neglecting the house, the baby, herself. This story is about how her charming Southern friends and family intervene to help Sloane through the days of suspense, in Southern Living style, with lots of family gossip, food and drink, and shopping.

(Fair disclosure: I received this novel through a raffle hosted at Beth Ann Chiles’ blog. Please read her review too. In fact, her blog is sponsored by people who donate money to charity based on the number of comments the blog generates each month. The first post of the month describes the cause your comments are being used to support. You are hereby encouraged to check out the charity of the current month and, if you approve of it, click through each post this month and comment with fundraising in mind.) 

The Secret to Southern Charm is a tribute to military families.

So what is the secret to Southern charm? In the book, one character says (jokingly) that it’s the accent. Another says that, no, it’s being kind. By the end of the book you may feel that the book is a statement that it’s enduring hard times. There’s a discussion guide at the back of the book; it invites book clubs to discuss this question.

Well, the book itself is charming in what I’d agree is a Southern way, for better and for worse. I know some Southerners—I’d call them the town variety, as distinct from the country kind—who behave like Sloane’s family, the fictional Murphys. I perceive them as culturally alien to my at-least-equally-Southern family. For one thing, except for Adam, they seem awfully sedentary. They don’t get up and go and do very much, and when they do travel, they sit down and ride.

They don’t tell each other important things and work through them together, either, until their secrets burst open and the mere fact of their having kept the secrets becomes offensive. They forgive each other for this, but it does create a lot of unnecessary melodrama. Sloane and Adam were married for a few years before they told each other the truth about children. He wanted them earlier, for the valid reason that right now, when he might feel better about having left Sloane with a son who was old enough to be useful around the house, he’s left her with a helpless toddler. Sloane’s mother, grandmother, sisters, and even their children, all have big bad secrets too.

Real families do this kind of thing, and yes, some of them survive. When they survive as families, I suspect it’s because their mental energy is so thoroughly engaged with “family” that, although they have jobs and friends, they don’t actually think about their jobs and friends very much. They go to lunch with an emotionally healthier friend now and then. They may even confide in that friend things like the secrets these women keep: “Don’t ever let my husband know, but...” And then they put that exposure to a calmer way of being behind them, and dive back into their shames and secrets and melodrama.

Well, it’s their way. It works for them. People like the fictional Murphy family aren’t interested in what I’d consider a saner understanding of what’s private, what’s confidential, what’s open though not necessarily interesting to the public, and what everyone needs to know. This novel is a study of how people can be emotionally intimate while concealing big bad secrets from each other.

And they live in places of great natural beauty. Occasionally they notice the beauty. Mostly they take it for granted. Rural Southerners are, if anything, more prone to do this than the city kind.

And they shop. They decorate. The places where they live may superficially resemble the functional homes of rural Southerners, where everything you see serves some practical purpose and has some reason for being where it is. (This is basically the same approach to decorating as the Early Salvation Army Store Look found in the homes of young students; as rural Southerners mature they usually find a valid reason for discarding the uglier pieces—how fortuitous that the baby was sick on the yellow couch!—and replacing them with better-looking ones.) They may also resemble the Front Room As Museum style favored in Washington and wherever world travellers maintain homes or retire, where the rule is to keep the background simple in order to display as many souvenirs and “conversation pieces” as possible; sometimes this type of collection ends up in an actual museum. People like the Murphys, however, even if they have jobs, spend a lot of their free time shopping for things that suggest either of these looks, or other decorating looks they may fancy. Often they pay more for battered old things that fit into the look of their choice than they’d pay for shiny new things. They don’t devote all this time and attention to composing arrangements of furniture and arts’n’crafts just to have something to natter about while keeping big bad secrets; they honestly like looking at objects other people hardly notice—but the hours of conversation about housewares help keep the big bad secrets covered up.

Personally I tend to rush through other people’s chitchat in real life. (“Worries about aging grandmother, check, now what is her point?”) My immediate family don’t speak in elaborate systems of nuance and I’ve never felt close enough to any other family to learn theirs, if they have one. At the same time I was aware that the nuances of what each member of the fictional Murphy family does and doesn’t tell each other member are what some readers will most enjoy about The Secret to Southern Charm. In Austen or Thackeray it’s worth slowing down to catch the nuances—they’re funny; in Trollope it’s not; in this novel the nuances aren’t particularly funny, but they can be instructive. They can help Southerners either explain their families to others, or explain some of our friends’ families to ourselves. They may help the rest of the world examine their families-as-subcultures, too.

One of the secret-keepers in this novel is the sort of person who sincerely thinks, “It really wasn’t shameful or adulterous, if only people could understand the way it was.” Readers may agree with her. I don’t believe morality is determined by emotional feelings. When we admit that things are sins, then we can hope to be forgiven. I believe it may well have been in a case like this that Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more,” and since the character has practiced self-control ever since I’m inclined to imagine that Purity Itself has forgiven her; but this is not a religious story. Forgiveness is not the point. For better or for worse, many years ago this woman deviated from her own ideal of Pure Chastity, and kept it a secret. The story is about how doing that has complicated her life.

Though Sloane is an adult, her immediate reaction to her husband’s going M.I.A. is the immature kind, so The Secret to Southern Charm might also be classified as a coming-of-age story. Sloane matures by living through her worries about her missing husband and aging grandmother, going to the funeral of one, and living in love with the other. At the end of the book she’s older and wiser, ready to live through her worries about another close relative. Stay tuned for the next book.

The Secret to Southern Charm is part of a series; it began with Slightly South of Simple and will continue through more family dramas.

Both volumes can be purchased as new books directly from Amazon or, if you want to support this web site, as new books here, for $20 per book, $5 per package (four books of this size should fit into one package), and $1 per online payment, as explained at the Payment Information Page. 

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