AVAILABLE NOW!
Also available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble
Journalist Katherine Snow Smith returned to her native North Carolina after her last child left the nest and a 24-year marriage ended. With more baggage and less time on the clock, she thought of fellow Tar Heel Thomas Wolfe’s book You Can’t Go Home Again. She writes with vulnerability and humor about forging an unexpected path, parenting, dating, reporting, aging, loss and launching the next act in a full life.
Oh yeah, she stepped on a blender minutes before leaving Florida for this latest chapter. Sometimes you just have to prop your bloody foot on the dashboard and put it in drive.
Praise for Stepping on the Blender & Other Times Life Gets Messy
By writing openly and honestly about her exciting firsts, interim changes, unexpected joys, and sad but inevitable goodbyes, Katherine Snow Smith’s prose invites us to reflect on and be grateful for our own stories—what we should remember and try never to forget—because time marches on, even when you step on a blender.
Katherine Snow Smith’s punch to our emotions proves she truly has wordsmithing in her DNA, as she follows in the footsteps of her father, A.C. Snow, editor and long-time Raleigh columnist who engaged North Carolina readers for 70 years. Katherine highlights her—and our—everyday dilemmas, dramas and delights with humor and honesty.
Katherine Snow Smith is a five-star storyteller, and the thing is, you don’t just want to read her book, you want to be friends with her. Readable, relatable, fun, funny, poignant and occasionally piercing, Stepping on the Blender is like sitting with a buddy who tells the best tales because she knows exactly when to cut to the chase and always leaves you wanting more. I did not want to put this book down, and neither will you.
Read an Excerpt
Illustrations by Alli Arnold
AVAILABLE NOW
Also available at Amazon, Apple Books and Barnes & Noble
Southern women are inundated with rules starting early―from always wearing sensible shoes to never talking about death to the dying, and certainly not relying on song lyrics for marriage therapy.
Nevertheless, Katherine Snow Smith keeps doing things like falling off her high heels onto President Barack Obama, gaining dubious status as the middle school “lice mom,” and finding confirmation in the lyrics of Miranda Lambert after her twenty-four-year marriage ends. Somehow, despite never meaning to defy Southern expectations for parenting, marriage, work, and friendship, Smith has found herself doing just that for over four decades. Luckily for everyone, the outcome of these “broken rules” is this collection of refreshing stories, filled with vulnerability, humor, and insight, sharing how she received lifelong advice from a sixth-grade correspondence with an Oscar-winning actress, convinced a terminally ill friend to write good-bye letters, and won the mother of all “don’t give up” lectures by finishing a road race last (as the pizza boxes were thrown away).
Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker will resonate with every woman, southern or not, who has a tendency to wander down the hazy side roads and realizes the rewards that come from listening to the pull in one’s heart over the voice in one’s head.
Praise for Rules for the Southern Rulebreaker
Katherine Snow Smith’s sure voice, deft pen, hilarious sense of humor and always original slant on things offer the reader much to enjoy in these delightful essays―and also much to identify with, especially for another Southern girl. Her delightful, humorous accounts always convey a deeper truth―about self-image, especially for women; about raising children; about an early death in the family and the later loss of a friend; about politics and belief―about life itself. Snow Smith’s own lifetime of writing and observant living is distilled in this kind, original, and compulsively readable book.
Katherine’s ability to observe her life from the balcony while it plays out on stage is a gift to her readers. Her keen perspective―which is unapologetically southern and chock-full of grit, forgiveness, and humor―reminds us that we all aspire to love well and to laugh until our face hurts.
Katherine Snow Smith knows how to tell a story. After finishing the last page of Rules for the Southern Rulebreaker, I thought: ‘That’s a woman I’d like to know.’
