Melissa Radke—television star, podcaster, and bestselling author of Eat Cake. Be Brave—writes a love letter to the strong, opinionated Southern women who raised her and the women who surround each one of us.

Lucy and Ethel. Laverne and Shirley. Dorothy and Sophia and Blanche and Rose. It’s the women around us who make us who we are, and Chicken-Fried Women is a celebration of them. It’s about the women who raised us, made us, taught us to cook and clap back. It’s the ones who prayed for us, raged at us and humbled us a notch or two when we needed it. It’s about the women who gave us our first perm, told us we “don’t have legs for a skirt that short” and admitted that cankles run in the family. These are the women who have encouraged us, teased us, chastised us, and mortified us. And as they fill up the seats around our table, we realize we wouldn’t have it any other way.

They’re our Chicken-Fried Women—battered on the outside, tender on the inside. Some are salty and a couple are Nashville Hot.

Filled with a hilarious cast of larger-than life women, this book explores why no one messes with Southern women and their hair, why the whole family comes along when you go bra shopping, why true crime and aquarobics brings us together, and how faith shapes us through it all.

Insightful, big-hearted and laugh-out-loud funny, Chicken-Fried Women is a celebration of friendship, kinship and the women who made us this way.