"Fierce with reality": The phrase comes from Florida Scott Maxwell's The Measure of My Days, a journal she published in her eighties about laying claim to the events of her life. Preston Browning's Virginia memoir appears late in his life and it, too, achieves much of that lovely ferocity, an achievement that crowns ordinary lives like Cousin Virgie whose tongue goes in and out to the rhythm of her rocking chair and Uncle Lewis ("Sweets") at the hoochie coochie show in Culpeper. Standing further back in time are tonier forebears like William D. Cabell and his school for Civil War veterans being groomed for admission to Harvard and General John Hartwell Cocke, a collaborator with Thomas Jefferson in establishing the University of Virginia. The gestures and language that bring these Brownings and Cabells and Cockes to life allow the reader, right along, to apprehend all that Browning has "been and done." Reading Affection and Estrangement makes us, too, "fierce with reality," thanks to the memoirist and his stunning stories.

      — Janet Varner Gunn, author of Autobiography: Toward a Poetics
          of Experience and Second Life: A West Bank Memoir

Preston Browning 's family memoir is warm and evocative. The heart of it lies in Browning's reflections on that vanished way of life, and on his mother and father. I could read a great deal more of this intimate family history. The cameos of the "grotesques" are charming and amusing and season the whole. But when the author is actively present on the page, either in characterizing himself in those days, or in probing the mystery of his parents' relationship (that ultimate mystery for us all) or explicitly interpreting southern culture—that's when this book really comes alive. The final chapter, "Legacy: The Land That Formed Me," is noteworthy for its nuance in examining that culture—more than nuance, complexity, a willingness not to discount the force of either side of a paradox.

      — 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