Flat Broke with Two Goats - Now There's a Title!

A raise for whoever thought up that title!  It truly grabs the reader's attention.

I've often had mixed feeling when finishing the last chapter of a memoir.  When someone asks you what you thought of a particular memoir, how fair is it to give your opinion about what happens in the book (the "plot" if you will) and the people in it (the "characters").  I suppose you could take the stance that the author wrote, had published, and is reaping the financial benefit of the book and therefore has opened him or herself up for comment.  But often I find myself judging the people and their actions as I'm reading the memoir, and not always in a good way.  It's one thing to be critical of a fictional character, another to be critical of someone telling you their life story.  

That said, I'll be discussing the writing in Flat Broke with Two Goats: a Memoir of Appalachia, by Jennifer McGaha.   Goodreads' blurb reads: "A charming memoir of one woman’s unexpected journey from country chic to backwoods barnyard."  "Charming" is not the word I'd use.  Anything that involves domestic violence, foreclosure, marital separation, and oh yes, venomous copperhead snakes in the kitchen is not charming.  Eventful, definitely, but not charming.

There are really two parts to the memoir - before the foreclosure of Jennifer and her husband's home outside Asheville, NC, and after as they must both make decisions about what kind of lives they want to live.  Before involves a bad and violent first marriage, and a second marriage, and children, and it details the family's fall from affluence during the great recession of the 2000s.  Afterward, Jennifer briefly separates from her husband, unwilling to follow him to their new home, an old and decaying mountain cabin a mile from the main road without many of the comforts most of us take for granted.  She returns after a few months and they slowly work on repairing the house, the land, and their marriage.  That's where the goats come in.  If you ever wanted to know whether two people with no farming experience can successfully raise a herd of goats, this is the book for you!  

The author does do a fine job of writing about the beauty of the mountains and the deep-rooted family pull the Appalachians have on her. 

"There, in a mossy hollow, three springs emptied into a creek that gathered momentum as it flowed down the mountainside.  I loved knowing that - that the waterfall was higher than I had ever imagined, that it sprang from the earth in a place where the soil was rich and loamy, that the part I could see from my porch was just a small fraction of the whole.  Watching the sun dip behind the mountain and the moon rise high in the sky, I realized that the waterfall I saw in front of me was not the exact waterfall I would see tomorrow.  It was continually reborn, renewed, restored....what I did now know without a doubt was that I was not alone, that I had never been alone, that the people who came before me were still here, would always be here."

I wish that she had incorporated more of the story of her grandparents and other ancestors; we barely get to know about them, but they're quite interesting and there's definitely a story there (perhaps for her next book?).