Some Day You'll Thank Me for This: The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Being a Perfect Mother »

Gayden Metcalfe is a native of Greenville, Mississippi, where she is a member of the Greenville chapter of the Garden Club of America, St. James's Episcopal Church, and the Animal Rescue League. Both the daughter of a Southern mother and a Southern mother herself, she and her husband have two children.

Charlotte Hays is a Delta native and recovering gossip columnist for the Washington Times, New York Observer, and New York Daily News. She lives in Washington, D.C.

A hilarious guide to that incomparable creature-the Southern mother

Southern society is arranged along matriarchal lines, since the Southern matriarch is a far more formidable being than the much nicer Southern male. She has to be this way; she was put on earth with a sacred mission: to drum good manners and the proper religion-ancestor worship-into the next generation.

In Some Day You'll Thank Me for This, Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, bestselling authors of Being Dead Is No Excuse and Somebody's Going to Die If Lily Beth Doesn't Catch That Bouquet, deliver up a hilarious treatise-complete with appropriate recipes from those finicky, demanding moms-on the joys, trials, and tribulations of being the daughter of a Southern mother. Including sections such as A Crown in Heaven (a Southern mother's favorite fashion accessory), Grande Dames, Toasting the Southern Mother, and why grandmothers prefer their "precious angel baby" grandchildren to their own "bad" children, this is the perfect gift for any Southern mother-or daughter of one.

Publishers Weekly

The authors of previous tongue-in-cheek Dixie primers (e.g., Somebody Is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn't Catch That Bouquet) offer a conglomeration of genteel recipes favored by their steel magnolia matriarchs and introduced by some outdated though cherished stereotypes about the Southern feminine temperament. As official daughters of Southern mothers (DSMs, for short), the authors enlist their memories and those of friends and acquaintances in compiling these touchingly witty anecdotes about their mothers, underscoring such time-honored Delta traits as fondness for monogramming and beautification, diplomatic double-speak, discretion and decorum, and not letting studying get in the way of their daughters' social schedule. The grandes dames earn some gentle, charming digs ("How could I be overdrawn?" the Southern mother expresses her financial wisdom in a nutshell. "I still have three checks"). The recipes included are truly precious antebellum throwbacks, such as dove and oyster pie, crabmeat imperial and charlotte russe, served in cut-glass crystal with ladyfingers. With holiday cheese balls, homemade mayonnaise, stuffed eggs and plenty of bourbon, these authors good-naturedly toast their Southern mothers, as they recognize, not ungratefully, that they are also becoming them. (Apr.)

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