‘In the Country of Women’ is a powerful American memoir
From Susan Straight’s kitchen window, she can see the hospital where she was born. “No matter race or wealth or religion or desire, there are people who leave and people who stay. I had to stay,” she writes in her lustrous new memoir, “In the Country of Women.” Had she left, she wrote, “my girls wouldn’t have had the safety and tether and history of our families.”
The book is steeped in that history and sense of place in Riverside, California, populated with citrus groves and pepper trees and burning
