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Two Piedmont North Carolinians who lived wildly different childhoods have written memoirs that mirror each other in unexpected ways. They share acres of common ground, too, including growing up in church culture.

Malcolm Jones, a member of the editorial department of the Greensboro Daily News from 1978 to 1983, has written “Little Boy Blues” (New York: Pantheon Books; 2010, 228 pages, hardcover, $24.95). It’s an account of an unusually stressful childhood in Winston-Salem. He’s now a reporter and editor in the Arts section of Newsweek. He’s worked there since 1989.

With a voice-activated computer, Martha Mason of Lattimore – a small town near Shelby – wrote “Breath: A Lifetime in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung” (New York: Bloomsbury; 2010, 334 pages, paperback, $16) before her death in 2009. Down Home Press of Asheboro originally published it in 2003. Jerry Bledsoe, a former Greensboro Daily News columnist, owns that press.

Mason lived 61 of her 71 years in an iron lung. The length of her life in the machine is thought to be the world record.

Both Jones and Mason are graduates of Wake Forest University. He graduated in 1974; she in 1960, summa cum laude. “Little Boy Blues” focuses on growing up with bickering parents in a disintegrating marriage up to about age 12. “Breath” is the memoir of a lifetime that began with a Norman Rockwell childhood until she was almost 11.

Oh, I realize some persnickety minds would argue this approach is apples and oranges, a distortion approaching dishonesty. Yep. That’s what makes it irresistible. Well, if you’re going to get picky, Jones was born in South Carolina and moved to Winston-Salem at age 2. Whether he’s a true North Carolinian is debatable. I’ll concede that.

When Jones writes he was scared of mayonnaise as a boy, even the casual reader can tell this was a kid with problems. His father, a ruggedly handsome veteran of World War II, was AWOL from their Winston-Salem apartment for days, weeks and months at a time. He had a drinking problem, which led to an inability to hold a job for any length of time. The apartment was the “size of a boxing ring.” Yes, he saw his dad deck his mother once.

His schoolteacher mother, a faded Southern belle, became the breadwinner. She had emotional issues of her own, elevating her childhood home in South Carolina to a myth to rival Camelot. Her insecurities were expressed in rigidity and routine, slights became persecutions.

She saddled her son with her baggage, micromanaging all aspects of his life. He worked hard to create emotional space for himself, finding portals to a larger world through marionettes, books and an old Victrola at his grandmother’s house.

In his father’s absence, a Presbyterian-minister uncle in Winston-Salem became a stand-in father. Southern Protestantism was the water in which Jones swam, oblivious for years to its insularity. Both he and his mother were choir members. We were, he writes, shabbily genteel.

But the memoir is wider and deeper than the obsessive examination of the emotional minutia of an unhappy childhood. The slow disintegration of his parent’s marriage in the 1950s and ‘60s is reflected in the fractures in the Southern way of life around him. He witnessed white flight. He asked as a kid about blockbusting. A new and brash popular culture was elbowing its way down church aisles, challenging old standards of what to think and how to live.

Four days after her older brother died of polio at age 13, Martha Mason learned that her headache, nausea, aching back and high fever were symptoms of the same disease. Her carefree childhood in Cleveland County was over. She would never again ride her bicycle, run to her grandmother’s, climb the magnolia or swim in a neighbor’s pool. She was almost 11.

Paralyzed from the neck down, she was put in an iron lung. The 7-foot, 800 pound metal cylinder encased her body from neck to toe. Pumps increased and decreased the air pressure inside the cylinder, inflating and deflating her lungs.

She had been extroverted, gregarious and boisterous as a girl, a test to the tolerance of her by-the-book Southern Baptist parents. Surprisingly, she kept her sunny disposition all her life, according to her memoir. She outlived by six decades the doctor who told her she would die within a year.

Like Jones, her mother was the dominant emotional force in her life. She devoted her life to the care of her daughter. A 10th-grade dropout, she wrote out the homework assignments her daughter dictated. She turned the book pages, enabling her daughter to read. She fed her. She bathed her. She changed her. She brushed her teeth. She did all this cheerfully, Mason writes.

Jones says that he and his mother were at odds until her death. She always wanted her little boy back, and Jones had left him far behind.

The huge difference in the memoirs is the sentences. Jones writes well. He’s always in control, never over-reaching.

Mason doesn’t write well. She’s florid and over the top. Dialogue sounds contrived, forced and unnatural. The clumsiness of some passages made me cringe. But I kept reading. It’s an incredible story of an extraordinary life.

“The very worst thing that can happen to anyone, I am convinced, is any form of brain disease,” she wrote.