cover image Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home

Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home

Lise Funderburg, . . Free Press, $24 (303pp) ISBN 978-1-4165-4766-2

Funderberg’s memoir continues the exploration of her mixed-race identity (started in her first book, Black, White, Other ) through the story of her black father, George. When George’s prostate cancer resurfaces after 15 years in remission, the author repeatedly makes the trip from Philadelphia down to Georgia with him to the farm he bought in 1985 in his home town of Monticello. The farm is next to the land his own father rented years before. Despite having to undergo chemotherapy and the re-emergence of painful memories, this time on the farm proves to be George’s happiest, as he shares with the author stories from his youth; reconnects with his local peers, Bubba and his brother Troy; and plans a colossal family pig roast. The author cuts back and forth in time from her father’s early migration North to find work to his father’s career as a Columbia University–educated doctor who originally moved back to Georgia to practice medicine among the poor community. The memoir perhaps dwells overly long on the final, clinical details of George’s faltering condition, so that the power of this multiracial story is sadly diffused among the many threads. (May)