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24th
Annual Literary Festival |
PORT FOLIO September 25, 2001 "The Rapture
of Sheri Reynolds" Part 1 (page 22) -- Part 2 (page 23) -- Part 3 (page 24) |
| "I
didn't know what to do with the money, so I got rid of it. I went around
writing $10,000 checks to my family members, and they weirded out about
it. My father didn't talk to me for six months. He wasn't mad, but it
was more money than he made in a year and real confusing for him. It built
walls." Understandably. Hers is a family of tobacco farmers - her grandfather and father both. Her father - whom she calls "one of the smartest men I know" despite lacking formal education - then sold fertilizer, hunted, fished. Now he farms crickets that he sells for bait and uses to go fishing himself. "My family never has money but they have their priorities right; They live within their means and have a good time. We ate the venison we shot, the fish we caught, and the vegetables we grew in our garden. Now, the further I get away from my background the more I love it." But her sudden wealth wasn't the only problem for her family. The book portrays a fundamentalist cult ruled by a tyrannical patriarch who compels his charges to mortify their own flesh in bizarre rituals - a story that some thought reflected Reynolds' own background. "That book is not about my background, but people thought that and it put my family on the spot. My family had TV crews at their home. It was and is painful to them." The whole Oprah experience, though pleasurable to Reynolds in some ways, was painful to her as well. On the wall of her dining room hangs a framed color photograph of her seated next to Oprah on the TV soundstage, looking like a schoolgirl called to the principal's office. "I'm an introverted person. I didn't want to be on TV or in magazines and do book tours. At the end of it I felt like my soul had done the triathlon. It was hard for me to be so public." Nonetheless, the sudden attention to her work paid dividends she hadn't counted on. "But it was real cool to be on the |
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