Trying to Get to Heaven

"Known to millions as 'Julia Sugarbaker' of Designing Women, Dixie Carter is one of Hollywood's best-known and best-loved Southern ladies. With her first book, she emerges as a fresh new literary presence. Trying to Get to Heaven is a personal report on the possibility of happiness and an ode to beauty (inside and out), family, and the spirit. Seasoned with Dixie's memories of growing up in Tennessee, her adventures in show business, and her philosophy of kindness and grace, and introducing a voice that is funny, warm, and self-deprecating, this is one conversation that you never want to end. From the inside scoop on plastic surgery to the warmth of the home, from the importance of etiquette and grooming to the transforming power of yoga, from the value of the family to the courage to be yourself, Dixie Carter has an opinion on just about everything.

"This book isn't an autobiography: it's about trying to become who you want to be. Dixie explains her sentiments through accounts of personal experience. She tells us how she became a star in her forties in a very tough town -- Hollywood -- and how she navigated divorce, parental death, and the raising and ultimately letting-go of her two daughters. She tells us how romantic love is a partnership that takes you where you never expected to go -- in her case, on long sailing trips that had her manning the boat in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night, exhilarated. And then there's what to wear to weddings, how to eat 'beauty food' all the time, and what it takes to feed the soul. Always present on these pages are the wonderful characters who make up Dixie's family: from her Aunt Helen, who advises us to 'stand up like a tree, like you are growing out of the earth,' to her father, who still dresses, to the ascot, for breakfast every morning.

"Written to cheer along her fellow travelers -- whether they're struggling with physical dilemmas or decline of the spirit -- Trying to Get to Heaven is many things, but above all it is a call to live life to the fullest."

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