Hissy Fit

Hissy Fit is Mary Kay Andrews’s 2004 novel, set in the small Georgia town of Madison and centered on Keeley Murdock, a successful local interior decorator whose engagement party turns into one of the most spectacular public meltdowns in contemporary southern fiction. Keeley has spent her young adulthood building her professional reputation and planning the kind of perfect wedding her hometown expects. When she walks in on her fiance and her maid of honor in a compromising position at the country club where their engagement party is being held, she throws the kind of hissy fit that the title promises and that gives the novel its driving energy.

The rest of the novel follows Keeley through the immediate aftermath. The professional consequences of being publicly humiliated in a small town where everyone knows everyone. The unexpected new opportunity that arrives when a wealthy client hires her to redo his entire historic Georgia mansion. The slowly developing romance with that wealthy client himself, the mysterious young entrepreneur Will Mahoney whose origins and motives are not exactly what Keeley initially assumes. And the wider drama of small town gossip, family secrets, and the slow recovery from a public catastrophe that Mary Kay Andrews handles with her characteristic warmth and humor.

What distinguishes Mary Kay Andrews from a lot of writers in her general territory is the affection she feels for the southern small town settings she works in. Madison, Georgia, is rendered with the kind of specific detail that only an actual southerner who knows these places can produce. The interior decorating angle gives Andrews room to write about color and design with the eye of someone who clearly loves both, and the historic mansion restoration that drives much of the romantic plot becomes its own character across the novel.

For longtime Mary Kay Andrews fans, Hissy Fit is one of her most loved early novels and one of the books that helped establish her in the mainstream of contemporary southern fiction. For new readers, the novel is a strong introduction to her style. Readers who enjoy Karen White, Patti Callahan, Adriana Trigiani, or Dorothea Benton Frank will find familiar pleasure here.