When I saw this audiobook on a library CD shelf, I pulled it off with sudden curiosity. I had loved reading Frances Mayes' book, Under the Tuscan Sun. But I hadn't followed her since that book came out in 1996 (and I steadfastly refused to see the movie version).

While she has since written poetry collections and additional titles about her time in Tuscany, this particular book travels in another direction: backward. Back to the American South and to Mayes' roots. This sounded like an interesting story to me. For some reason, I hadn't realized that she was from the South. So I popped her voice into my car stereo and took off.

Frances Mayes grew up in Fitzgerald, a small town in southern Georgia. We learn that she hightailed it out of there as quickly as she could, after college. She spent most of her professional career living in San Francisco. Later, she and her husband divided their time between California and Tuscany. But a book tour through the South triggered something inside her, and she suddenly got the urge to move back to the region. Not back to Georgia, though. Instead, the couple moved to Hillsborough, North Carolina. Why had she left the South, so long ago? And why had she come back? These are the questions that this memoir aims to answer.

The why-she-left part means that Mayes must revisit the first 20 years of her life, when she lived in an often tumultuous though sometimes joyful household dominated by her parents, Garbert and Frankye Mayes. She's the third and last daughter: a wild child, eager to rebel, even if it means that she'll get the switch for her behavior later. Her coming-of-age story features such other real-life characters as her paternal grandparents, Daddy Jack and Momma Mayes; her two grown sisters; and random aunts, uncles and cousins. Everyone is wrapped up in the history of this town and in its cotton mill, which her father manages. Willie Bell, the family's African American maid, turns out to be a confidante and an ally, not to mention a darned good cook. (Readers can't help but be reminded here of Kathryn Stockett's book, The Help.)

We follow Frances as she now, in retrospect, reconciles with the past. This part of the story ends when she escapes Fitzgerald by graduating from college, marrying Frank and moving to California. By then, I think I may have heard more childhood stories from Frances than from anyone else over the course of my entire life. And these are truly memorable tales, too.

Naturally, on the CDs, Frances tells us all of these stories herself, in her thick southern accent. When had my northern ears last heard such Deep South talk? Was it from Dixie Carter and Annie Potts on Designing Women, when the show still ran on network TV? Was it from Dolly Parton in the movie Nine to Five? (I learn now that all three of these women were originally from Tennessee, and not from Georgia. So maybe their voices aren't exactly the same.) Or was I remembering conversations from times when I traveled through the region myself? Nevertheless, some listeners may have to tune or train their ears a bit to the sound at first, if it's an unfamiliar one. The accent is infectious. Through 10 hours and eight CDs of it, I knew that if I listened to the whole book for a full second time, I would soon be talking exactly like Frances. And yet, hearing her stories in her own voice makes them even more real, more authentic. You wouldn't get the same experience if you read the book with your own narration running in your head.

But Mayes' speech is not even the best part of this work. It's her writing, her words, her poetic prose. Through her vivid imagery we can truly witness it all: the landscape, the people, the food, the smells, the heat. This book serves as an homage to the South of the 1940s-50s. Mayes knows what it was like. She was there.

If I had had the printed book in hand, I would have re-read some of her paragraphs over and over again, just to savor her word choices and the languishing flow of her language. And then there's her fondness and wide knowledge of literature of all kinds, too. She has a habit of adding relevant quotes from famous authors, including Southern writers, for Mayes has long been a well-read lover of words and of books. She is a writer's writer, whatever this may mean.

For these reasons, I recommend this book for writers in general, and to anyone who wants to specifically write memoir pieces. Listen to the first CD in the set, or read the preface and the first two opening chapters in print. This is how you do it, people. This is what happens when a writer who has fallen in love with words wants to share her story with others.

Under Magnolia is a coming-home kind of history, and yet it is also one of personal and geographical exploration. We all know that you can't go home again. Another Southern writer gave us this advice, decades ago. Here, Mayes gives us more food for thought on the subject. And she would top it off with a slice of toasted pound cake smeared with butter, or a pan filled with a fresh batch of brownies, right out of the oven.