In 1976, Kreis Beall and her husband founded Blackberry Farm, a luxury hotel and resort. The setting is idyllic, nestled on 4200 acres between Chilhowie Mountain and the Smoky Mountains National Park in Miller’s Cove in Blount County, Tennessee, and the resort is renowned. Her life was on a dramatic upswing. She and her husband created restaurants in South Carolina and Alabama and bought properties all over before returning to Blackberry Farm and then Knoxville. Then the unthinkable happened. In 1999 she fell off a golf cart and suffered a terrible brain injury which left her deaf. Her recovery left her unable to continue the ambitious projects that had occupied her life, and several years later, her marriage came apart. The last chapters of her book tell the story of how, living on Blackberry Farm, she began to put her life back together.
New York: Convergent Books/Penguin Random House, 2020. 288 pages. Hardback in dust jacket.