A smoke-ringed mirror
House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home by John T. Edge (Crown Publishing, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
The phrase “smoke and mirrors” is used to suggest deception. Often that means an act being disguised or obscured. House of Smoke is no way “smoke and mirrors.” Instead, it is a mirror John T. Edge has held up to his life, ringed by the smoke of a barbecue pit. Long known for his love of Southern food and its role in Southern identity, in House of Smoke, Edge has finally brought his own personal history fully into the narrative he has been working to untangle throughout his adult life.
House of Smoke is an engaging memoir that grabs the reader like flypaper and keeps you turning pages. Edge begins with his childhood in Clinton, Georgia. Those who have seen certain episodes of TrueSouth will be familiar with the challenges he faced as the child of an alcoholic mother and the ways in which his childhood home played a role in Civil War history. Edge unpacks all of this, including additional childhood trauma. Amidst it all, one important throughline of stability in his childhood was the love of barbecue he shared with his father and the trips they took to restaurants all over their region. His nose for that scent has stuck with him.
By the time Edge gets to college, it’s unsurprising to the reader that he lands with a boozy splash at the University of Georgia. He never wants to go home—and can’t because his parents soon divorce—and neither does he want to conform. He drinks, he fraternizes, he gets into music, and he does not end up graduating. Despite his dissolute lifestyle, he begins to develop serious interests. The music he hears at places like the 40 Watt Club makes him reconsider his understanding of the South and, with it, himself. Eventually he completes the Georgia dream and moves to Atlanta. He works a few years in a corporate job before coming to the conclusion that he wants to go back to school and study the South. Much of his polo shirt and partying youth leaves him wanting to become someone he can respect, which seems to require he understand where he is from.
In almost every way, his life comes together once he makes it to Oxford, Mississippi. He benefits from idealistic professors in Southern studies, has opportunities to write and mingle with authors, begins a career through caring about food, and meets his wife. In Oxford he begins to live a life he can be proud of, becomes a father, and really wrestles as well as he can with the riddle of the South. He rises to fame with the Southern Foodways Alliance. It all goes really well, until it goes wrong. Professional challenges, COVID, and a car accident end up stacked on his plate like a meat and three. But the man Edge has become by the time of this memoir can respond to challenges in ways his younger self could not. He emerges with some new sorrows, but with a great deal of strength and with the support of meaningful relationships. He has also learned that understanding himself means more than understanding regional history, he has to go down to the bone of personal history. He may have moments of feeling lost, but he is no longer a lost boy.
This book is a bit of a buffet. For the children of alcoholics and people with significant childhood trauma, Edge’s story and his slow process of learning to acknowledge and share his own history will be moving and informative. For those who have feelings one way or the other about “cornbread nationalism,” this is a look inside that movement and its more recent complications. For those who appreciate food history and/or Edge’s storytelling style, this book has many beautiful passages. You can practically hear his narration of TrueSouth in many of the passages. (I was only waiting for Wright Thompson to remind me about Yellawood.)
Every memoir raises the question, “what is the good life?” Edge’s story shares his successful attempt to build one. In his case, he has tried to live out “celebratory activism.” He has learned to face his past rather than run from it. He has learned to own his mistakes but also avoid hating himself. He has tried to love where he is from without leaving it the way he found it. He is the kind of man who continues to nod along with the wisdom of Reverend Will D. Campbell. As Edge explains, “Campbell’s point of view ran counter to the common liberal take on my native region, in which dutiful sons and daughters claim to both love and hate the South. Faulkner wrote that refrain into his novels. So did generations of writers who followed. Campbell’s take was more radical. He would not allow a straddle. We were all culpable for the South’s shortcomings. We were all beneficiaries of its beauties” (125). That is not an easy position to have or to hold, but Edge does his best.
House of Smoke shows the ways in which we are shaped by place and the narratives we have of the places we are from. Edge grew up in a house celebrated for its connection to a Confederate general. Being in Oxford, MS, a place which celebrates the book, was tremendously beneficial to his emergence as an author. His story also shows that it is possible to build a full, rich life wherever you find yourself. He was happy to see the Confederate flag lose momentum in Mississippi. He added to Oxford’s cultural reputation. It’s not a matter of hating or avoiding coastal cities rather than running to them, it’s about cultivating the ground where you are.
If there’s anything you should take with you into this book and away from it, it’s the pleasure of living. You don’t have to pour a Boulevardier to enjoy this book, but it wouldn’t hurt. You don’t have to plan a weekend trip to the best barbecue restaurant within six hours, but perhaps you should. This is a book to be read near good art while eating some good food, to be talked about in good company, and to be pondered in a landscape you love. That’s really what you should do with all books anyway.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
