The book is written from the perspective of Kimmel as a young girl, and in it she sheds light on the townspeople of Mooreland living there in the 1960s and 1970s during the author's childhood.
[1] Her second memoir, She Got Up Off the Couch, and Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana, is more history of her childhood, but it also tells the story of her mother, Delonda, who decided to return to college in her middle-age years to eventually become a teacher.
She lives in Durham, North Carolina, has been married three times and has three children (Kat, Obadiah and Augusten- named after American writer Augusten Burroughs).
The Solace of Leaving Early (2002) and Something Rising (Light and Swift) (2004) are the first two novels in Kimmel's "trilogy of place" about fictional Hopwood County, Indiana.
Her most recent published works include a children's book, Kaline Klattermaster's Tree House (2008), and the novel Iodine (2008), a psychological tale about a young woman with dark secrets.