The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Bailey White's Sleeping at the Starlite Motel and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home. We hope they will give you a number of interesting angles from which to look at this sparkling collection of amusing and pentrating sketches.

Bailey White shares her native south Georgia with her readers through a series of unforgettable incidents and characters. There are her cousin Ralph, a model of industrious decorum who goes off on a downward spiral of debauchery after eating an unaccustomed candy bar; her great-aunt Della, who resolutely sells her ancestors' heirlooms so that she can afford to stay out of the nursing home; and Mrs. Boatwright, a down-to-earth, old-fashioned third-grade teacher who cuts school events to attend the dog races. Bailey White's world may sometimes seem idyllic and remote, a fantasy of small-town America, but with her expert touch, White imbues it with details so true that we know it to be utterly real and alive. Her unerring instinct for the absurd and the magical makes her milieu seem both fresh and familiar, a place of the imagination that becomes, for a moment, every reader's home town.