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Bless Their Hearts: A Memoir

In a small Pentecostal church tucked into the hills of northwestern Alabama, a boy sat in a hard wooden pew and watched the world go by. What he watched was magnificent. What he watched was also, frequently, unhinged.

There was Donna Baker, who hadn't cut her hair in years and whose updo defied several known laws of physics. Betty Sue Reynolds, who showed up everywhere, wept over a customized van, and once cried so hard during a testimony that no one could determine what she was testifying about. Lurleen Pinkerton, who checked on the green beans and reported back that they were delicious, having eaten all but one serving. Shirley, who served fruit salad with mayonnaise and kept a peeping tom the whole neighborhood never quite managed to catch. And Shaye McAllister, who wore a full-length mink coat in July in Alabama and somehow made it look like the rest of the world had dressed wrong.

The theology was loud. The casseroles were abundant. The hair was architectural.

Twenty characters. Twenty portraits. Twenty love letters to the people who kept a boy laughing in the years when laughing was the only thing he had left to do -- and who never knew what they were giving him.

With the kind of warmth that only comes from someone who was actually there, and the kind of wit that comes from watching Brother Arnie shout about shrapnel for forty-five minutes on a Sunday morning, Alexander Thompson pays tribute to the faithful, the eccentric, and the deeply, specifically, magnificently themselves.

Companion to Dear Joseph: A Memoir.