Family Life

Unpaginated. "Kaye Gibbons is a North Carolina writer who has risen out of poverty and difficult circumstances to produce a series of successful novels. Gibbons was born Bertha Kaye Batts in Nash county, N.C. on May 5, 1960. She had a poor and troubled childhood from which she has drawn liberally to create her novels. She grew up in a tin-roofed house with an alcoholic father and no electricity or running water. Like the title character of her debut novel Ellen Foster, Gibbons' mother committed suicide when she was ten years old. Gibbons' father died just three years later, in 1973. She was passed around from relatives to foster parents before living in relative stability with her older brother David. She attended North Carolina State University in 1979 and then transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1980, where she met her writing mentor, professor Louis Rubin. He encouraged her to write Ellen Foster. College was also where Gibbons was first diagnosed with the manic-depression that has affected her on and off her entire life. Although the disorder caused her to attend college irregularly, she finally obtained her degree in American literature in 1987."