DG Martin interviews Lee Smith- On Agate Hill It is 1872, Agate Hill, North Carolina. On her thirteenth birthday, Molly Petree peeps out the chink of a window from her secret hiding place up in the eaves of a tumbledown old plantation house to survey a world gone wild, all expectations overthrown, all order gone. “I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” she begins her diary. “I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl…but evil or good I will write it all down every true thing in black and white upon the page, for evil or good it is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.” Carefully she places the diary in her treasured “box of phenomena” which will contain “letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and a large collection of bones, some human and some not” by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003. The contents of Molly’s box make up this extraordinary novel which chronicles her passionate, picaresque journey across” the whole curve of the earth” -through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial---and finally back to Agate Hill to end her days under circumstances that even she could never have imagined.