“Roy Blount, who is the funniest person I know, journeys deep into the dark heart of humor and brings back a wonderfully insightful, superbly crafted song of the soul that had me laughing and crying too.”
Dave Barry
“An intimate family story that’s brilliant, funny and ultimately very kind and loving.”
Bobbie Ann Mason
“Few writers create narrative threads so closely following the process of memory as Roy Blount, Jr. All the more apt that his memoir, Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story, manages to collect a swarming beehive of memories, incidents, stories, and mild exaggerations, bundle them together with a humorist’s half-knot of narrative, and make it read like a revelation.”
BookPage
“. . . a wild tell-all, a raucous, unflinching memoir as funny as anything he’s ever written, and that’s saying a lot, since Blount’s one of America’s wittiest writers. Like his 14 previous books, Be Sweet is both literary and down-home, a thinking man’s thigh slapper, crammed with the verbal dazzle we’ve come to expect from him — puns, allusions, jokes, outrageous anecdotes, eye-opening commentary. But this book’s different, because it’s also a serious heartbreaker. “Instead there is that tentative synthesis that results from all great autobiographical writing — an ability to link experiences together via language, Blount’s great gift. Discovering correspondences in disparities has always been the method of his madness, his way of getting at the comic essence of daily life from baseball to rock-and-roll. Having now boldly taken up the harder puzzle of love and self in Be Sweet, he gives us this unique and moving portrait of the humorist as a young man, the Southerner as son of an unresolved past.
Josephine Humphreys, New York Times Book Review