Mary Carter Bishop's "Don't You Ever"

A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Mary Carter Bishop was on the Philadelphia Inquirer team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of nuclear leaks at Three Mile Island. Her Roanoke Times & World-News series on poisonings and fraud by exterminators and other pesticide users won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer finalist.

Bishop applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son, and reported the following:

This is irresistible, because page 99 in my book does indeed represent one of its central themes — our family’s vulnerable status in our overwhelmingly wealthy community of Keswick, Virginia, where our parents were servants. A passage on page 99 describes my renegade older brother’s thieving and spying on the gentry:

Ronnie roamed Keswick like an undercover agent. He crept around the houses and peered in at the rich people in their dining rooms and in their bedrooms. For all its high-class charm, Keswick, to Ronnie, was a vulgar, craven place. With all his prowling and peering, he was tweaking the monster’s tail. Keswick’s servant class customarily looked the other way at wild behavior by the rich, but here was Ronnie trespassing on Keswick’s most precious commodity: the freedom of the elite to do as they pleased, safe from prying eyes.

Learn more about Don't You Ever.

My Book, The Movie: Don't You Ever.

Writers Read: Mary Carter Bishop.

--Marshal Zeringue