Grab the Lapels

Goodbye Earl by Leesa Cross-Smith

Leese Cross-Smith writes novels and short stories about characters who became young adults in the late 90s and early 2000s. If that was you, I’m sure you recognize the title of this novel, Goodbye Earl, from the song “Goodbye Earl” on the 1999 The Dixie Chicks’ wildly successful album Fly. The song is about two best friends from high school, MaryAnne and Wanda. MaryAnne goes out into the world to make her way while Wanda marries a local named Earl. After they’re married, Earl starts beating Wanda, and when she tries to tell the police and get a restraining order, he abuses her so badly she ends up in intensive care unit at the hospital. MaryAnne flies home, and long story short, she feeds Earl poisoned black-eyed peas and buries his body. The song ends cutsey, with MaryAnne and Wanda selling homemade jam and ham along the road in a stand they bought together.

Author Cross-Smith borrows heavily from The Dixie Chicks (now renamed The Chicks), including the friend who leaves the tiny town, the friend who gets married and is a victim of domestic abuse, the ICU, and the black-eyed peas. But how did she turn a short country song into a 400-page novel? Instead of two friends, Cross-Smith creates four friends, BFFs who graduated high school in 2004. The chapters are narrated in different times and by each of the four friends. For example, you can read Caroline’s thoughts in 2004 and then her life in 2019. Then, we switch to Rosemarie in 2004 followed by a chapter in 2019. Etc. Once again, the author raves about the trends and perfection of the turn of the century, and I’m sent right back to high school myself (I graduated in 2003). According to the internet, Cross-Smith would have graduated high school around 1996, so that’s puzzling.

Oddly, Cross-Smith manages to completely skip what made American terrible in the early 2000s, including our involvement in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the abuse of Middle Eastern-Americans (and Sikhs because they “look” wrong) and Muslims, the rise of unquestioned patriotism, and the permanent health affects that destroyed the lives of first responders to the Twin Towers. To be fair, Cross-Smith writes an abusive step-father to one of the girls and a mother who drinks a bit too much for another, but the tone of the country, which affected everyone, was missing. I can be judgey here because I lived it. I entered college in 2003, and nearly every assignment had something to do with 9/11 — the after effects were pervasive, and some classes had military students or family of military members in them, and we were all tense.

What really bothered me about the book Goodbye Earl was the obvious issues (domestic violence and addiction) were Big Issues, but everything else is perfection. Each of the four girlfriends meets her perfect guy in high school, and even if they don’t marry that man once they graduate, then men wait for fifteen years for the women to come around. Who does that? The friend who left on a plane (because it happens in the song) comes back to the tiny town for a wedding, and there he is, the boy who fell in love with her in 2004, just waiting, smelling like “woodsmoke and apples.” Cross-Smith does lightly address racism in the American south when a rich white man keeps pointing out that Kasey (one of the four friends) has a black father.

In addition, there is emphasis on baking. One friend became a baker of pies, cupcakes, cookies, wedding cakes, you name it. All four women are constantly eating, and it drove me a little nuts. You cannot eat 3-4 cupcakes per day and be okay; I know because I’ve tried that, too. Honestly, I think Cross-Smith would be an amazing cozy mystery author, but her work is published as general fiction meaning that when it’s too sweet, the emotions feel disingenuous, or what my spouse would call “unearned and therefore manipulative.”

I think this will be my last Cross-Smith book. To be fair, the author is from one of those middle-southern states (Kentucky), is a Black women, and married her high school boyfriend, so perhaps she’s living the dream and I’m a skeptical old shoe. Goodbye Earl will definitely have an audience that will find and love it.

25 comments

  1. This doesn’t sound like a book for me – I hate it when emotions don’t ring true! I need my characters to feel authentic. I did like The Chicks back in the day but don’t listen to them anymore. I felt so bad for them when they were dragged into all the post 9/11 “patriotism” BS.

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  2. I love The Chicks and the song Goodbye Earl, but this book doesn’t sound like my cuppa. It’s too bad the author turned it into something light rather than the laughing-seriousness of the Chick’s song.

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    • I think the author has it in her to write more serious stuff. The scene in which the wife is attacked by her husband is short but effective, but the focus on cupcakes and flowers (literally) after she’s put in the hospital really drops it down to cutsey territory that I don’t appreciate.

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  3. I remember the book we were reading when I had to hit the eject button. There is a difference between methaphorically cashing in a genuine emotional response to events happening to a well written character, glossing over a terrible event to walk the reader through with a colder reaction than they might otherwise have, and taking shortcuts to avoid the effort of building the setting and characters. If a character kicks a puppy unprovoked two pages after they’re introduced without much fanfare and you’re supposed to hate them for the rest of the book, you’re depending on the reader to simply agree that puppy kicking is bad. Isn’t it more interesting if the person has PTSD from being mauled by a full grown, small breed dog as a young child, and the puppy was just trying to play? And maybe it turns out that person donates a lot of money to animal shelters because they know it isn’t the animals’ fault they have debilitating fears… or maybe you find out that is their cover story for being the kind of person who kicks puppies and lies about it? Sure, that puppy got kicked either way, but you have to earn the emotional capital and spend it carefully or else you’re just being the kind of person who hurts a puppy for a cheap reaction.

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    • I read this post, and my first thought was, “What puppy hurt you??” I kid, but I see what you mean. The book that you hit eject on was A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton. A toddler drowned in the first 2 pages, which was the launching point for the whole novel. I absolutely love your perspective, and I also received an email from a GTL reader agreeing that your take makes a lot of sense and is appreciated.

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  4. Again I enjoyed this post, particularly for the introduction at the beginning to the Dixie Chicks and their song. I’ve heard of them but don’t know their music.

    I also enjoyed your analysis of how the book doesn’t capture the vibe of America at that time. Reading your posts and your perspectives on what your read is always a joy.

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    • I loved the Dixie Chicks back in the early 90s/00s. Their songs are just wonderful and moving. I haven’t kept up with them, but they are still making music. In 2020 they changed their name to The Chicks to avoid a connection with anything “Dixie” (which often is connected to racism).

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  5. I never listened to The Chicks, and I’m not familiar with this song so I can’t make a comparison. However, I’d love to try eating 3-4 cupcakes per day (all chocolate, of course). I’ll get back to you on how that works out, lol.

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  6. I was going to say that I don’t remember having that many 9/11 related assignments but obviously this book is set in the USA where it would have been impossible to ignore – and the impact of 9/11 and then the war were certainly felt here too. I think I know exactly what Nick is describing – I usually think of that as emotionally manipulative and it drives me crazy.

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    • If the teacher didn’t assign something about our feelings related to 9/11 or the War on Terror, there would be a student in the class whose best friend’s brother was in stationed in the Middle East, and he said blah blah blah, which her friend told her, so obviously it must be true. It was definitely a time of people trying to get info from the source, and the source was typically a person stationed overseas, but then that info was one perspective that TRAVELLED. You couldn’t dismiss that student’s opinion for fear of suggesting a soldier actively saving our lives was wrong.

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      • That makes a lot of sense. There’s so much more emotion attached then and it’s complicated. We have a good friend who served with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan in the early 2000s and what I know of his experiences are eye-opening. But we don’t laud the military in the same way here so when he returned to Canada, he says most people reacted very negatively to him. You never see people in military uniform here unless they’re in a parade or something.

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  7. My youngest daughter graduated in 1999, so before 9/11. So I didn’t see that part of it play out but even half a world away we took every opportunity to demonise Muslims (and Sikhs).

    Reading the review it was fun seeing you have the same reaction as we Boomers do to novels set in the “sixties”.

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    • Your youngest graduated in 99? I hadn’t realized your kids were that much older that I. You have to tell me more about how Boomers demonize books set in the 60s! I’m not sure what that looks like, nor what the concerns are.

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      • Firstly, the sixties didn’t get started until around 1965. I mean, The Beatles started off wearing suits and ties!. And I doubt that those of us who were teenagers then even knew that ‘flower power’ was a thing until very late in the decade. I went up to uni in 1969 and many students were still wearing twin-sets and woolen skirts or flannel trousers and sports coats. It was probably the anti-war movement of the early 70s that radicalized our clothes as much as our politics.

        Like any situation where you can say “I was there”, authors writing from a distance – time or space – get it wrong.

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        • Nick often talks about how the town in which he grew up being located in an isolated area set back his pop culture references by about a decade, so I can see how things are later than we think when we look back and generalize.

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  8. I too am a skeptical old shoe. A man waiting fifteen years for a woman? Most wouldn’t wait 15 months. I do love that Dixie Chicks song though. And like you I also graduated in 2003, and I love being transported back to that time. My experience would be different having been up here in Canada, but it’s easy to look back on an earlier time nostalgically, and forget about all the bad stuff too.

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