When I met Dorothea Benton Frank for the first time, I knew, before she spoke, she had been raised in the South. (We could never agree on the year we met, so Dottie settled on “a while back” as the time frame.)

It was June in New York City, beastly hot out, when the bestselling author breezed into BookExpo America wearing the southern lady summer uniform: crisp linen separates, patent leather flats, and pearls. The pearls were the size of malted milk balls. The story goes a man approached her when she was wearing the necklace on a previous occasion and sneered, “Where’d you get such big pearls?” She shot back, “from big oysters,” before she told him what pier he could jump off and into which ocean. Dottie, like the Duchess of Windsor before her, liked a monogram. DBF might have been her initials, but they stood for “Don’t Be a Fool.” She never suffered a single one in her too-short time on this earth.

When I was temporarily blinded by her enormous diamond ring in the Javits Center that day, I asked her to give it to me—it was the least she could do, since I would be seeing spots for the rest of my life. She said, “I can’t give it to you. My long-suffering husband, Peter, gave it to me, and I love that man. He has a full head of hair, you know.” (I didn’t know, I hadn’t met him yet.) The next day, a box arrived from Dottie. She had sent me a big diamond: a glass paperweight the size of my head.

A few years later, she became obsessed with a shade of lipstick I wore. I made the mistake of giving her the tube. I now have a variety of videos (from her), filmed in twelve states (by her), whereby she forced random readers to try Maybelline Brazen Berry #903 while she filmed them, convinced it was a shade that looked good on everyone. It didn’t. All that little exercise did for certain was eat up the available memory on my phone. Dottie was the worst photographer and camerawoman who ever lived. Every woman she filmed looked like a terrified model on a 1976 Stephen King mass-market paperback.

Dottie shot her subjects in a particular angle, from the entrails up, whether human or the main course for that night’s supper. She liked to photograph her meals on book tour and text them. “Wish you were here. The shrimp are size nine,” she wrote, sending a blurry photo of her gumbo. “Size nine?” I queried. She texted back, “They’re so big they could borrow my pumps.”