With humor, warmth and candid honesty, Preston Browning brings to life the rural South of the 1930s and 40s and the home town of his youth, Culpeper, Virginia. Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir is part personal reflection, part portraiture of distinctive personalities (ranging from the eccentric to the famous), and part self-analysis. Browning wrestles with the themes of race, class and religion in an effort to understand how he came to be the man he is. In Affection and Estrangement, by turns hilarious, sad, strange and endearing, Browning's stories are always entertaining, carrying the reader back into a world long lost to the modern age.

"Fierce with reality"

      — Janet Gunn, author of Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience

Browning's family memoir is warm and evocative. I could read a great deal more of this intimate family history.

      — Richard Todd, author of The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity

I was immediately engrossed.... Beautifully written and compelling, it is full of the wonder of old times, childhood horrors, and the lasting/perpetual crises of human life. From the final chapter I learned a great deal about the South, my mother's family, and myself.

      — Elaine Neil Orr, author of Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life