Clyde Jeanette Shore, born Winston Salem, NC 1948
(Two By Two Client #11, 2025)
INSTAGRAM | WEBSITE
Clyde Jeanette Shore, named after her father and paternal grandmother, prefers to be called Jeanette. She was born in Winston Salem and raised on a tobacco farm along Chicken Bridge Road in Chatham County, Pittsboro, North Carolina—the setting of her family’s haunting true story. The fourth of seven children, Jeanette grew up steeped in rural Southern traditions, eventually leaving home after high school to attend Business College at Chapel Hill.
Jeanette is the author of My Purpose for Dying, a deeply personal LGBTQ nonfiction work honoring a promise to her youngest brother, Ricky Frederick Shore, who passed away in early 1994. The book traces Ricky’s fierce and loving spirit, his identity as a gay man, and his journey through the most devastating years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s—before life-saving treatments became available.
Her second book, Chicken Bridge Road, is a historical novel rooted in family memory and real events. It centers on her mother, Pauline Darnell Shore, who in 1958 shot and killed her abusive husband, Clyde F. Shore —Jeanette’s father—while pregnant with Ricky and caring for six children. In a landmark case, Pauline was acquitted of murder by a Coroner’s Jury, marking one of the rare instances in North Carolina history in which a woman was found legally justified in killing her husband after prolonged abuse. Jeanette’s literary adaptation is both a daughter’s reckoning and a writer’s tribute—giving voice to a woman silenced for too long.