The Climb from Salt Lick: A Memoir of Appalachia by Nancy L. Abrams

The author of this downright compelling memoir, Nancy L. Adams, reminds me of Cheryl Strayed – spirited, frank about sex and pot, and unobtrusively contemplative. The short chapters are separated into even shorter sections, so the book is easy to pick up and put down. The story begins when Abrams, a self-described “Jew-ish” girl from St. Louis, arrives from the University of Missouri School of Journalism to work for the Preston County [West Virginia] News in 1974. Preston County is a land of pastoral and natural beauty located between West Virginia University in Morgantown and the Maryland line, bordered on the north by Pennsylvania, and on the south by hundreds of miles of mountains and small communities all the way to Roanoke, Virginia. Two strands of youth culture rebellion, the working class “outlaw” and the middle class “hippie,” tend to merge in less populated rural areas, and are compatible, mostly, with earning a living. This memoir illuminates this lifestyle as Nancy falls in