Found somewhere between The Liar's Club and Absalom, Absalom, Hard Winter is about desire, defeat, and endurance.
Three generations of Kentucky women are bound to gender and poverty. Etta the matriarch, embraces the past while slipping into poverty, Marjorie, her groomed daughter throws off the confines of arranged marriage to live with a Capital L that quickly kills, and Jeannie Mae, the daughter embracing her fallen image sets out to replicate with ruined marriages, illegitimate children, interracial relationships and drug addiction in a perverted South.
Jessie is tied to a religion that costs her daughter her life and the hatred of her children. Their stories are written on the flesh of the children they leave behind. A discovery of southern gothic histories that carves meat from the bones of our current society and places them on our table in full view, a reckoning of societal struggle with patriarchal and racial constructs designed to keep us in our place.
