#grinnin

Grinnin’ Like a Jackass Eatin’ Briars

On Sale Now at Amazon

I WAS CADDYWONKED FROM THE GET-GO.

That’s how this vivid, hilarious and ultimately poignant memoir begins, under the cover of darkness in 1962, as an embryonic Jeff Batton was whisked away by his brothel-owning grandmother and soon-to-be-birth mother to a home for unwed mothers in Savannah, Georgia.

After he was put up for adoption (displayed in a supermarket delicatessen case, as he recalls it), Jeff’s new parents arrived in the form of Mr. and Mrs. Batton. Jo Ann adhered to the standards of Emily Post and the Bible (in that order), and Curtis was a third-generation Georgia farmer and true southerner who filled his tea glass with something stringer each night. Jeff’s new home: a seven-hundred-acre peanut and tobacco farm so far from town that they had to pipe in sunshine.

Coming of age during the civil rights movement, Jeff experiences both the Tom Sawyer existence of idyllic barefoot freedom—including a deep friendship with a kid from the other side of the tracks—and blatant racism at home, along with the confusion and angst of figuring out who he was and how he fit into this world.

Wile the memoir has the South as it launching point, the narrative travels far and wide beyond the trope of a barefoot childhood, to New York City, Hong Kong, London and beyond. Lovingly told, with warm and stark transparency and laugh-out-loud humor, Grinnin’ Like a Jackass Eatin’ Briars is an important book about uncovering our own truth, looking at the world from a different angle and, ultimately, find the courage to embrace what we find.

“A compelling first-person account… Elements of his life are desperately sad yet recounted with a brisk frankness… From recounting his endeavors to find his birth mother to describing his struggles with fatherhood, Batton presents a richly textured autobiography—readers grappling with their own sexuality may well relate to his journey of self-discovery.

A captivatingly candid and sharply written account.”