Twelve Sweetpotatoes
Escaping from a Carolina Soap Opera
A Southern Memoir
A Transformative Memoir
by
Joan Barnes Copeland
Twelve Sweetpotatoes is an Americana reflection of the author’s life on her mother’s hardscrabble tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina. The reader joins the author as she tells stories along her intimate path to healing from life-shaping family alcoholism, mental illness, loss, and suffering. It is a dark story, yet an inspirational book for anyone wishing to change their life from the drama and chaos of dysfunction to a life of peace and perhaps, joy.
Twelve Sweetpotatoes
The title is based on a dream the author had that reflected her parents’ own dream of returning to farm life in Eastern North Carolina. When she was growing up in the cities of Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia, in the ’50s and early ’60s, her mother promised that everything would be better when she finally bought the tobacco farm and they moved to Carolina. That farm life was going to solve all their problems, all their unhappiness. Reality is, it didn’t change anything. It just became their family graveyard.
The author is the only one of her immediate family who escaped that Carolina Soap Opera.
