In 1998, student balloting in ENG 366 resulted in the following reading assignment for week 12.  Wells's novel Divine Secrets narrowly defeated Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes and Stephen King's novel Misery.
 

Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996)
 

The immensely successful follow-up to her 1992 debut novel, Little Altars Everywhere, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood has been on national bestseller lists for most of the past year -- perhaps you'd even noticed the striking cover in a bookstore before our vote.  Wells grew up in Louisiana and now lives in Seattle -- locations central, as you'll soon see, to Divine Secrets.  But she is quick to point out that her work is not mere autobiography.  As she puts it on the Harper Collins official "Rebecca Wells web site" (see link below), "I grew up in the fertile world of story-telling, filled with flamboyance, flirting, futility, and fear. My work, though, is a result of my imagination dancing a kind of psycho-spiritual tango with my own history, and the final harvest is fiction, not memoir." Since this is the last book in our course, as you read you might think about the ways in which it revisits central preoccupations we have encountered so far.  Which books, in particular, does it recall, not simply in terms of literal references, but more metaphoric or thematic ones?  What genre, if any, would you say this book falls into?  What social or cultural changes over the past half-century (the distance from Farewell, My Lovely to Divine Secrets) seem most clearly expressed in Wells's novel?  What particular contemporary interests (or fantasies) does the book embrace?  What readers do you think it is most intended for?  How effective is the book's structure, particularly its organization of stories from past and present?  You might also compare your own reactions to the novel with the fascinating "customer comments" found at amazon.com (see link below).

Links

www.ya-ya.com -- the official site for Rebecca Wells  (includes a "Gumbo Ya-Ya bulletin board," Ya-Ya chat groups, "study questions" about the novel, and news & information about forming your own Ya-Ya Chapter, dahlin)
On-line customer comments at amazon.com (247 and counting...)
Reviews, synopses, & messages from Wells to her readers (amazon.com)

Little Altars Everywhere (reviews, synopses, etc., from amazon.com)