Truth and Beauty - best first line of a book ever

All this heat has made me think of the beginning of Ann Patchett's memoir Truth and Beauty. Greatest first line of a book ever from one of Nashville's very own literary lights:

"The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August. In 1985 you could also pretty much count on the fact that the U-Haul truck you rented to drive from Tennessee to Iowa, cutting up through Missouri, would have no air-conditioning or that the air-conditioning would be broken. These are the things I knew for sure when I left home to start graduate school. The windows were down in the truck and my stepsister, Tina, was driving. We sat on towels to keep our bare legs from adhering to the black vinyl seats and licked melted M&Ms off our fingers. My feet were on the dashboard and we were singing because the radio had gone the way of the air conditioner. "Going to the chapel and we're -- gonna get mar-ar-aried." We knew all the words to that one. Tina had the better voice, one more reason I was grateful she had agreed to come along for the ride. I was twenty-one and on my way to be a fiction writer. The whole prospect seemed as simple as that: rent a truck, take a few leftover pots and pans and a single bed mattress from the basement of my mother's house, pack up my typewriter. The hills of the Tennessee Valley flattened out before we got to Memphis and as we headed north the landscape covered over with corn. The blue sky blanched white in the heat. I leaned out the window and thought, Good, no distractions."

I'm rushing this post because I'm off to New York in a few hours (where, by the way, it is exactly 30 degrees cooler - hallelujah!). But did want to share Ann Patchett's response to the uproar at Clemson last year after her memoir was an assigned read for incoming freshmen. In response to calls for banning the book and cancelling her scheduled talk, Patchett absolutely put them in their place. Love this woman! And I love love her book - drop everything and go buy this if you have not yet read it. Here's what she had to say:

"If stories about girls who are disfigured by cancer, humiliated by strangers, and turn to sex and drugs to escape from their enormous pain are too disgusting, too pornographic, then I have to tell you, friends, the Holocaust is off-limits. The Russian Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the war in Vietnam, the Crusades, all represent such staggering acts of human depravity and perversion that I could see the virtue of never looking at them at all."