The Steps We Take

A Memoir of Southern Reckoning (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)

By: Ellen Ann Fentress

Narrated by: Lee Ann Howlett

Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She’s also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. “Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location,” she observes in The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. As a good southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others.

But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern make that American white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia. Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white “segregation academies,” a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the Washington Post, Slate, Forbes and other publications.

The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.

The book is published by University Press of Mississippi. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2023 University Press of Mississippi (P)2025 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A forthright reflection on the effects of segregation." (Kirkus Reviews)

"This is a courageous and tough-minded work. It is also an important one." (Lili Anolik, author of Hollywood's Eve)

"Arresting and clear-eyed memoir..." (Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Everlasting)

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