Local Literary Legend Lee Smith Discusses Her Latest Novel, On Agate Hill
On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch,
Friday, November 10, at 9:30 PM & Sunday, November 12, at 5 PM

A dusty box discovered in the wreckage of a North Carolina plantation house contains the remnants of an extraordinary life: an 1870s diary of a young girl, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones. It’s through these treasured mementos that we meet the unforgettable heroine of Lee Smith’s new novel, On Agate Hill.

Raised in the smoldering ruin of the post–Civil War American South, young Molly Petree, now orphaned, has no intention of wasting time on self-pity. She means to live her life to its fullest. So, when a mysterious benefactor appears out of her father’s past to rescue her, she doesn’t look back—until she is an old woman and returns to the farm on Agate Hill. Spanning half a century, On Agate Hill is a novel of obsessive love, unexpected adventures, and luck—both good and bad.

Lee Smith, a virtuoso of voice and vision, creates flesh-and-blood characters tempered with equal doses of comedy and tragedy. Like her popular and beloved novels Oral History and Fair and Tender Ladies, On Agate Hill is storytelling at its very best. In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, November 10, at 9:30 PM, this local literary legend shares her eagerly-anticipated twelfth novel—the story of a self-described "ghost girl" who survives the Civil War devastation that claims her family.

“There were so many people like Molly Petree [during the Civil War] who were refugees, and people of every color and social group were fleeing—like a seething mass of displacement,” says Smith. “When I was writing [On Agate Hill], the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was happening, and I was having an enormous emotional reaction to that because my main character was also displaced.  So, some of the terrible emotions and experiences I was seeing on television were going into this book.”

Like a ballad of the Old South, Lee Smith’s tale of Molly Petree’s journey resonates with passion, humor, and drama, but also reveals the reality of Southern living during the Civil War Era.

“This whole notion of the Civil War and Reconstruction as a time of displacement and alienation really flies in the face of a lot of stereotypes about the South,” admits Smith. The author jokes, “we tend to only read things that seem like we just sat on our porches over 300 years…and the South was a stagnant entity.” 

Fortunately, the Hillsborough author’s new novel frames a fictional story with the complex truths of her beloved South.

Lee Smith is the author of nine previous novels as well as three collections of stories. Her ninth novel, The Last Girls, was a New York Times bestseller as well as co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, Smith lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Don’t miss D.G. Martin’s all-new interview with Lee Smith on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, November 10, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, November 12, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During this season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests also include: Will Blythe (To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever), John Hart (The King of Lies), Sarah Dessen (Just Listen), Kristin Henderson (While They’re at War), David Payne (Back to Wando Passo), John Hope Franklin (Mirror to America), Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me), Andrew Britton (The American), Allan Gurganus (New Stories of the South), Tom Carlson (Hatteras Blues), Bill Smith (Seasoned in the South), William Leuchtenburg (The White House Looks South), Dot Jackson (Refuge), Art Chansky (Blue Blood),  Mark Ethridge (Grievances), Paul Leonard (Music of a Thousand Hammers: Inside Habitat for Humanity), Angela Davis-Gardner (Plum Wine), Pat Taylor (Fourth Down and Goal to Go), and Charles Frazier (Thirteen Moons).

For more information about additional series guests and airdates, plus, the all-new Bookwatch blog and online book club, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other local productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.

—UNC-TV—