The book recognizes the achievements by a nineteenth-century community of women religious, the Grey Nuns of Lewiston, Maine. The founding of their hospital was significant in its time as the first hospital in that factory city; and is significant today if one desires a more accurate and inclusive history of women and healthcare in America. The fact that this community lived in a hostile, Protestant-dominated, industrial environment while submerged in a French-Canadian Catholic world of ethnicity, tradition and paternalism makes their accomplishments more compelling.

Children who grow up in southern families whose God has a death grip on them are prone to melancholy. God and Family is a poignant prose filled picture of misery that often gives way to humor. The writer gives the child of chronic church attending, drug and alcohol addicted relatives a voice from where she sits today as an adult. When the pieces have been read in spoken word performances the response by many in the audience is one of recognition. Even when we were miserable we were not alone.

The book recognizes the achievements by a nineteenth-century community of women religious, the Grey Nuns of Lewiston, Maine. The founding of their hospital was significant in its time as the first hospital in that factory city; and is significant today if one desires a more accurate and inclusive history of women and healthcare in America. The fact that this community lived in a hostile, Protestant-dominated, industrial environment while submerged in a French-Canadian Catholic world of ethnicity, tradition and paternalism makes their accomplishments more compelling.