SOURCE: “Simply Talking: Women and Language in Kaye Gibbons's A Cure for Dreams,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4, Summer, 1997, pp. 97-106.

In the following essay, McKee analyzes the uniquely feminine language in Gibbons's A Cure for Dreams and the way that language binds the female characters to a community of women.

Not coincidentally, the final word of Kaye Gibbons's third novel A Cure for Dreams (1991), is “talking.” Pairing that word with the work's first one, “simply,” reveals the primary activity of the novel—simply talking. The talkers in this case are the women of small-town North Carolina who take pleasure in the art of conversation and discover in language a power otherwise inaccessible to them as women in pre-World War II America. For the female characters of Gibbons's novel, words bind generations, not just as members of the same family or as citizens of the same small town...