Books/Bay Boy
Essays · Adult
Bay Boy
Point Clear before the spas and the galleries: a sleepy resort town, empty all winter, with a working population and a boy who had nothing to do but be outside.
The book
A charming, humorous, and colorful coming-of-age memoir: a collection of essays about growing up in Point Clear, Alabama, when the eastern shore was a sleepy resort community, practically deserted in the winter, with a considerable population of working-class residents.
Forts built out of driftwood. Boats. Mardi Gras, shrimping, fishing, dove hunting, hurricanes, jubilees, camping, and the local characters attached to all of it. Watt’s brother, Murray Key, illustrated the book.
The prose is simple and direct, and some of it is very funny.
Life in Point Clear is really about being outside. I have never found a place so perfectly suited to exercise a young boy’s imagination.
Details
- Publisher
- University of Alabama Press
- Illustrator
- Murray Key
- ISBN
- 978-0-8173-9263-5
- Subject
- Memoir in essays — the Alabama Gulf Coast
- Companion
- Among the Swamp People, on the delta side of the same life
Also
The delta
Bay Boy is the bay side. The swamp side — the cabin, the neighbors out there, twenty years of weekends — is its own book.
Read next
More from the same water.
Novels for young readers, Southern fiction for grown ones, and nonfiction from the delta.
Among the Swamp People
Twenty years in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, a driftwood cabin, and the people out there.
Cottonlandia
A Manhattan prep-school kid is sent south for four days and learns he isn’t going home.
Terror at Bottle Creek
A category-three hurricane, an Indian mound, two girls, and a bear in the next tree.