Going Home - Southern Style

A Road Trip with Denise Hildreth

Growing up in the deep south you find yourself doing a couple of things every time you take a road trip back home. First, you try to figure out what animal figures the Kudzu has formed on the interstate. Secondly, you know exactly which “ma” and “pa” gas station between your house and your mama’s has the best boiled peanuts. And thirdly, you know the name of every back road from here to home because twenty years of road construction has taught you a thing or two about navigating them.
There is nothing like going home. Good or bad. Everyone has an Aunt Norma who thinks all old people are deaf. Everyone has an Uncle Cecile who thinks no one knows what he’s spitting in his Coke Bottle. And Everyone has a family with secrets that even they’ll go to the grave holding on to.
For the past five years I’ve had the privilege of navigating the highways of southern fiction. Some days they’ve taken me to places I’ve longed to remember, other days to places I had thought had long been forgotten and still other days they have opened up entire new worlds to me. But the stories I love most aren’t the overall arching themes that any story has, but the intricate relationships that through their heartbreaks, humanity and healing are woven on the pages telling the real story.
In my newest book The Will of Wisteria I found myself traveling back to my old stomping ground of Charleston, South Carolina. Having lived there for three years its presence has never left me. However, writing about it always scared me. A city so rich with history and characters and heart, was something I didn’t know if I could effectively capture. But what I found was it became about the people in the story and the city hovered over them like a faithful companion.
In this story of four blue-blood siblings, who are all kidnapped the night before the reading of their father’s will, and taken to a secret reading, they are informed that in order to receive their inheritance their lives will have to drastically change for the next year. What ensues is a tale of lifelong secrets, hidden desires and unmet needs. But the chord that ties each sibling together is that of home. Where they came from has defined where they are. Yet each one realizes that being willing to bend, even if ever so slightly, can change even the things they thought were unchangeable.
In the core of the human heart lies the desire for at least one person in this life to completely understand who we really are. Yet, what I’ve discovered is that first we have to realize who we are. And that is where the real story lies...the journey of discovery. And it is that journey that makes The Will of Wisteria about much more than a city, but about the people who call it home.


Denise Hildreth is a graduate of the University of South Carolina. Her trilogy about the much loved character Savannah Phillips featured in Savannah from Savannah, Savannah Comes Undone and Savannah by the Sea have been featured in Southern Living and awarded the Bronze Medallion by ForeWord Magazine. Her last release Flies on the Butter based on the song by the same name sung by Wynonna Judd was once again chosen by Southern Living and was her third Pulpwood Queen's Book Club Selection. She makes her home in Franklin, Tennessee.