At The Millions, Darcey Steinke gives an elegy for her Southern hero, Barry Hannah. She recalls their first interaction—when he called her to say a New Yorker review of her first novel had made him angry—and the relationship that followed. Most importantly, though, Steinke writes how Hannah offers a view of the South otherwise unexplored:
Hannah, on the other hand, hadn’t gotten the memo about the folksy-soft-glow south; instead he drove full throttle into the taboos of the messed up region, taking on the Jesus-obsessed nuts, the macho lunatics still hurting from the loss of the Civil War, the racial friction, and the lush almost mystical landscape.
