I got Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe during my thrift store haul a few months ago. I had read something online that said it was a great book about women's friendship, or something to that effect. I had mostly enjoyed the movie Steel Magnolias, so I thought I'd give this a try.
Well, it was different. FGTatWSC has two main storylines. The primary one is set in modern times (the 1980s) and is about Evelyn, a depressed middle-aged woman with an unsatisfying life, becoming friends with an elderly woman, Mrs. Threadgoode, at her mother-in-law's rest home, and this friendship gives her a new outlook on life. Mrs. Threadgoode is originally from a small Alabama town by the train tracks called Whistle Stop, and she tells Evelyn all about the town, its varied and sometimes kooky inhabitants, and the Whistle Stop Cafe. Her stories make up the second storyline, although we also get some omniscient narrating going on, as the storyline contains things we know Mrs. Threadgoode couldn't know.
Evelyn and Mrs. Threadgoode are the two main characters of the modern-day storyline, and the Whistle Stop Cafe's proprietresses, Idgie and Ruth, are the two main characters of the Whistle Stop storyline, which takes place from the 1910s to the 1950s or so. Idgie, who grew up with Mrs. Threadgoode, is a tomboy (read: butch lesbian) who decides to never wear dresses again at age 9 and falls in love with older, new to town Ruth as a teenager. Ruth, afraid to be gay/sin, leaves Whistle Stop and goes back to her fiance and marries him, breaking Idgie's heart in the process. The husband turns out to be a sociopath serial rapist and seducer who domestically abuses and rapes her, so she leaves him and gets back together with Idgie, and they open up the Whistle Stop Cafe.
The Cafe cook is Idgie's old nanny, Sipsie, who is African American. Her family is described to us just as much if not more, in some ways, than the white families in Whistle Stop. Since this the American Southeast in the early 20th century, there is of course a ton of racism. While I appreciated that Ms. Flagg fleshed out the African American characters instead of leaving them to be invisible background characters, which often happens with domestic help in this era, I could have done without being told how some of them died, and many of them experienced horrible yet unsurprising racism. Many white townspeople didn't like how Idgie and Ruth fed hobos, but they really got mad when they fed Black people (not even in the cafe but out the back door), and Idgie and Ruth had to stand up to the KKK a few times. There was some parsing of different attitudes held by Black people as the Civil Rights Movement progressed, such as looking down on their elders who had worked for white people.
All in all, this was a very interesting account of Southern small-town life and a lesbian love story. I was surprised by how many townspeople knew about Idgie and Ruth's real relationship and were fine with it (the others just considered them good friends). While I didn't talk about Evelyn much, I really identified with her despair and rage, including how she often imagined herself as a superhero, killing all the bad guys in the world. The eighties truly were similar to today, politically. I liked that she found the confidence to take charge of her life. There is also a riveting murder mystery with a twist ending, and recipes of some of the foods mentioned! I recommend this book if you can handle sad stories and everything that goes along with stories set in the American Southeast in the 20th century.
Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: late October-early November
From: thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away
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