Heather Fain, director of publicity at Little, Brown, introduces Katie Crouch to the crowd assembled for the prepublication party thrown for Crouch's debut novel, Girls in Trucks, which comes out in April. The back room at Southern Hospitality, Kevin Federline's Upper East Side bar, was packed with a mix of Little, Brown staffers and transplanted southerners, viewed as one of the key target audiences for Crouch's story of one girl's growing up in Charleston, South Carolina and what happens after she leaves.

As the party wound down, Crouch's agent, Rob McQuilkin, decided to show me the T-shirt she'd given him as a present:

Whether he actually does brake for boiled peanuts was left unresolved.

Since Crouch writes so eloquently in the first chapter about cotillion training school, I asked some of the other southern women in the room if they'd had similar experiences growing up. Here's Little, Brown publicity director Heather Fain and New Yorker promotions director Maura Hogan (no relation):