Laura Love: You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes

As we've been promising for many years now, Laura Love's memoir is finally ready, along with a CD of music written expressly to accompany the chapters of the book. Both the memoir (on Hyperion Books) and the CD (on KOCH Records) share the same title: "You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes." Here's a review:

The Washington Post

Smothering Instinct By Chrissie Dickinson

a freelance writer and former editor of the Journal of Country Music Wednesday, August 18, 2004; Page C03

In 1972, when Laura Love was 12 and her sister 13, their mother, Wini, fashioned nooses in the living room so the three could hang themselves in order to join God. But first Wini instructed Love to hang the family cat, Sugar Plum, from the curtain rod in the bathroom. In Wini's ghastly delusion, no one in the house, not even the girls' pet, was to be left behind to suffer. In a wily twist of fate, Sugar Plum slipped free of her noose and sauntered back into the living room, just as mother and daughters were about to step off their chairs and into eternity. The girls tossed away their nooses, stepped down from their death chairs and hugged the cat. The sight cracked Wini's resolve. "And so it ended, [in] a reprieve," Love writes matter-of-factly from the distance of three decades. "For the want of a sturdy knot, the trajectory of our lives had once again been altered."