Holy Roller

"[This] vivid memoir. . . recollects childhood in the context--well, in the clutches--of all-encompassing religion. Wilson's fierce determination and passion characterized her first memoir, An Unreasonable Woman, about her David vs. Goliath fight against a polluting Texas chemical company. Now she delves into her childhood in a hardscrabble Pentecostal shrimping family, surrounded by fire-and-brimstone preachers, radio evangelists, tongue-speakers, snake-handlers, and her own relatives--believing women and fallen-away men. Wilson's prose is breathtaking in its dexterity and blunt poetry, as when she recounts being conscripted as a scout to accompany her grandfather and Aunt Patty, under cover of night, to break into a game warden's riverside shack in pursuit of an incriminating gun. Wilson evokes in her rural Gulf Coast setting an exotic place at the intersection of transcendence and squalor, coated in oyster dust and the conviction that God saves (the Pentecostal believers, and no one else)."

—Library Journal [starred review]

2008 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award
Autobiography & Memoir
HONORABLE MENTION

“Wilson's prose is breathtaking in its dexterity and blunt poetry.”
—Library Journal, starred review

In this rollicking memoir, Diane Wilson—a Texas Gulf Coast shrimper and the author of the highly acclaimed An Unreasonable Woman—takes readers back to her childhood in rural Texas and into her family of Holy Rollers. By night at tent revivals, Wilson gets religion from Brother Dynamite, an ex-con who finds Jesus in a baloney sandwich and handles masses of squirming poisonous snakes under the protection of the Holy Ghost. By day, Wilson scratches secret messages to Jesus into the paint on her windowsill and lies down in the middle of the road to see how long she can sleep in between passing trucks.

Holy Roller is a fast-paced, hilarious, sometimes shocking experience readers won’t soon forget. It is the prequel to Wilson’s first book, telling the story of the Texas childhood of a fierce little girl who will grow up to become An Unreasonable Woman, take on Big Industry, and win. One of the best Southern writers of her generation, Wilson’s voice twangs with a style and accent all its own, as true and individual as her boundless originality and wild youth.

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About the Author

Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper, began fishing the bays off the Gulf Coast of Texas at the age of eight. By 24 she was a boat captain. In 1989, while running her brother's fish house at the docks and mending nets, she read a newspaper article that listed her home of Calhoun County as the number one toxic polluter in the country. She set up a meeting in the town hall to discuss what the chemical plants were doing to the bays and thus began her life as an environmental activist. Threatened by thugs and despised by her neighbors, Diane ...

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