Even on the cusp of the 21st century, when television and business franchises have practically terraformed America into a coast-to-coast suburb, there are large patches of poverty and cultural drought where a capable body means far more than a nimble mind. Patricia Foster grew up in Alabama in the '50s and '60s, the youngest daughter of a small-town doctor and his pseudo-sophisticate wife. Her family was among the wealthiest, best educated, and most respected in the region, but due to their roots in the fields, mines, and factories of the Deep South, they could never quite escape the thought that they might be inherently inferior. Foster's memoir, All The Lost Girls, begins at the cusp of the 20th century, recounting the harsh lifestyle of toil and service that constituted her grandmother's and great-grandmother's days. Foster goes into greater detail for the story of her mother, one of a litter of kids, who was encouraged by a sharp-eyed teacher to apply to college. There, she would meet her future husband, who himself went from a world of bare subsistence to a world of scholarship. Apart from that background, Foster devotes most of her book to her vivid memories of trying to please her mother by being the brightest and most talented fish in a tiny pond. She writes of her shame at loving the untamed outdoors, of how she secretly wished to have had a hardscrabble past to overcome, of her struggle to determine how femininity jibed with becoming an intellectual, and how her addiction to her parents' approval (and disapproval) prevented her from making a true break from the South until well into her 20s. When Foster is really on a roll—writing about her brother's painfully glorious high-school football days, or her own early attempts at cheerleading or creative writing—All The Lost Girls has the narrative pull of a great Southern novel. At times, the book actually reads like the notes for such a book. But by sticking with the facts, however well-dramatized, Foster misses an opportunity to integrate her themes and the distinctive characters she encounters into an organized survey of the post-Baby Boom South. What she does catch on her pages is the unsteady feeling of being caught between two worlds, striving toward the sort of style and value system that would make a person a stranger in her own hometown.