Book: Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You

Overview
Lewis Grizzard’s 1983 book Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You gathers his newspaper humor into a loose, fast-moving portrait of late-20th-century Southern life. Rather than a conventional novel, it is a mosaic of columns and essays linked by Grizzard’s chatty first-person voice, part front-porch storyteller, part press-box wisecracker. He riffs on small-town Georgia roots, college football, barbecue and grits, the minefield of romance and marriage, and the way modern America keeps barging into the South with newfangled manners and funny ideas about iced tea. The title signals both the book’s romantic misadventures and its soft spot for a vanished innocence, packaging nostalgia and needling satire in the same grin.

Structure and Content
The pieces are compact, often only a few pages, built around the rhythms of a column: setup, curlicue of observation, punch line. Threads recur. He remembers the bewildered boy who once adored the prettiest girl in school, then proceeds to skewer the grown man who still can’t quite make sense of women. He celebrates the fierce, church-picnic loyalty of Bulldogs country and the ritual pageantry of fall Fridays, then turns that zeal inward to tease the chauvinisms and contradictions that come with it. Grizzard toggles between anecdote and broadside, airline travel, bad motel art, overcooked vegetables, the perils of self-help, and returns to home truths about family, fathers, and the code of Southern manners that says the story should be funny even when it hurts a little.

The Title Essay
“Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You” anchors the collection with a comic valentine to a high school crush whose triple-name perfection becomes shorthand for every unreachable ideal. Grizzard plays it for laughs, sweaty-palmed dances, helpless comparisons, grand declarations no teenager could deliver, while letting a wistful chord hum beneath the jokes. The piece becomes a lens for the older narrator’s rueful education in love: how desire blurs judgment, how memory embalms embarrassment in amber, how the South trains boys to chase dreams they’re not equipped to catch.

Themes
Nostalgia threads through the book, but it’s a ribbed nostalgia, protective of front porches and Friday nights yet alert to the absurdities baked into them. Regional identity looms large: Grizzard loves the South’s language and foodways, its rituals and nicknames, and he winks at both the self-parody and the earned pride. Masculinity is examined and deflated. The blustery, opinionated male narrator is forever stepping on rakes, out-argued by women, outmaneuvered by modernity, rescued only by self-deprecation. There is also a running meditation on belonging. Whether railing against pretension or defending grits, he is mapping the emotional geography of home.

Style and Humor
Grizzard’s humor is brisk, colloquial, and heavy on the one-liner. He loves the escalation gag, the extended simile, the feigned outrage that melts into a wink. The voice is both barstool and newsroom: conversational, punchy, proud of plain talk. Sentiment sneaks in at the edges, especially in remembrances of childhood and of a father who looms large by his absences. The cadence is designed for out-loud reading; it feels like a performance, with an audience that knows when to nod and when to hoot.

Cultural Context and Legacy
Appearing as his newspaper fame crested, the book helped carry Grizzard from regional columnist to national humorist. It captured a moment when Sun Belt swagger met cable-age sameness, when local quirks stood out against a homogenizing culture. Some attitudes and jokes read as period pieces now, but the core, an affectionate, needling defense of place; the comedy of male befuddlement; the ache of remembered first love, retains its warmth. As a snapshot of Grizzard’s early-80s persona, it is both calling card and time capsule, equal parts valentine and wisecrack.