Tom Robbins, the author of such pie-eyed and hippie-deluxe novels as “Another Roadside Attraction” and “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” is rarely thought of as a Southern writer. But he was born in Appalachian North Carolina during the Great Depression and grew up there and in Virginia. He’s the grandson of two Baptist preachers.

His accent was so thick, Mr. Robbins writes in “Tibetan Peach Pie,” his appealing if wobbly new memoir, that, as a child, he said “far” instead of “fire” and “hain’t” instead of “ain’t.” Later he tried to scrub that accent away. It almost worked. Today his slight drawl sounds, he complains, “as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear.”

After college, Mr. Robbins fled the South for the Pacific Northwest, where he slowly morphed into a moonbeam of the counterculture. During his heyday, in the 1970s and early ’80s, he was like Zonker Harris, from “Doonesbury,” sprung to life: shaggy red hair, lopsided mustache, illegal smile. His novels were cult objects, and that cult metastasized.

Mr. Robbins became a staple on best-seller lists, a reliable dispenser of winsome acid trips. In “Another Roadside Attraction” (1971), the mummified body of Jesus Christ turns up at a highway zoo and hot-dog stand. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1976) is set on a lesbian commune and is prescient in its bummed-out awareness of environmental degradation. “Still Life With Woodpecker” (1980) takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes.