Judith Paterson was just nine when her mother died of a virulent combination of alcoholism and mental illness at the age of thirty-one. Sweet Mystery is her harrowing account of the memories of her mother, placed against a background of relatives troubled almost as much by Southern conflicts over race and class as by the fallout from a long family history of drinking, denial, and mental illness.

An exquisitely written memoir that captures the perspective of childhood as evocatively as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Sweet Mystery is rich in the details and flavor of small-town life in the rural South of the 1940s. Drawing on both personal experience and recent research, Sweet Mystery explores the effects of early trauma as well as the strengths of circumstance that enable some children to survive them.