Three on a Theme: Books on Communes by Crossman, Heneghan & Twigg
Communal living always seems like a great idea but rarely works out well. Why? The short answer: Because people. A longer answer: Political ideals are hard to live out in the everyday when egos clash, practical arrangements become annoying, and lines of privacy or autonomy get crossed. All three books I review today are set in the aftermath of utopian failure. Susanna Crossman, who grew up in an English commune, looks back at 15 years of an abnormal childhood. The community in Birdeye is set to collapse after two founding members announce their departure, leaving one ageing woman and her disabled daughter. And in Spoilt Creatures, from a decade’s distance, Iris narrates the disastrous downfall of Breach House.
Home Is Where We Start: Growing up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream by Susanna Crossman
For Crossman’s mother, “the community” was a refuge, a place to rebuild their family’s life after divorce and the death of her oldest daughter in a freak accident. For her three children, it initially was a place of freedom and apparent equality between “the Adults” and “the Kids” – who were swiftly indoctrinated into hippie opinions on the political matters of the day. “There is no difference between private and public conversations, between the inside and the outside. No euphemisms. Vaginas are discussed over breakfast alongside domestic violence and nuclear bombs.” Crossman’s present-tense recreation of her precocious eight-year-old perspective is canny, as when she describes watching Charles and Diana’s wedding on television:
It was beautiful, but I know marriage is a patriarchal institution, a capitalist trap, a snare. You can read about it in Spare Rib, or if you ask community members, someone will tell you marriage is legalized rape. It is a construction, and that means it’s not natural, and is part of the social reproduction of gender roles and women’s unpaid domestic labour.
Their mum, now known only as “Alison,” often seemed unaware of what the Kids got up as they flitted in and out of each other’s units. Crossman once electrocuted herself at a plug. Another time she asked if she could go to an adult man’s unit for an offered massage. Both times her mother was unfazed.
The author is now a clinical arts therapist, so her recreation is informed by her knowledge of healthy child development and the long-term effects of trauma. She knows the Kids suffered from a lack of routine and individually expressed love. Community rituals, such as opening Christmas presents in the middle of a circle of 40 onlookers, could be intimidating rather than welcoming. Her molestation and her sister’s rape (when she was nine years old, on a trip to India ‘supervised’ by two other adults from the community) were cloaked in silence.
Crossman weaves together memoir and psychological theory as she examines where the utopian impulse comes from and compares her own upbringing with how she tries to parent her three daughters differently at home in France. Through vignettes based on therapy sessions with patients, she shows how play and the arts can help. (I’d forgotten that I’ve encountered Crossman’s writing before, through her essay on clowning for the Trauma anthology.) I somewhat lost interest as the Kids grew into teenagers. It’s a vivid and at times rather horrifying book, but the author doesn’t resort to painting pantomime villains. Behind things were good intentions, she knows, and there is nuance and complexity to her account. It’s a great mix of being back in the moment and having the hindsight to see it all clearly.
With thanks to Fig Tree (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Birdeye by Judith Heneghan
Like Crossman’s community, the Birdeye Colony is based in a big crumbling house in the countryside – but this time in the USA; the Catskills of upstate New York, to be precise. Liv Ferrars has been the de facto leader for nearly 50 years, since she was a young mother to twins. Now she’s a sixty-seven-year-old breast cancer survivor. To her amazement, her book, The Attentive Heart, still attracts visitors, “bringing their problems, their pain and loneliness, hoping to be mended, made whole.”
One of the ur-plots is “a stranger comes to town,” and that’s how Birdeye opens, with the arrival of a young man named Conor who’s read and admired Liv’s book, and seems to know quite a lot about the place. When Indian American siblings Sonny and Mishti, the only others who have been there almost from the beginning, announce that they’re leaving, it seems Birdeye is doomed. But Liv wonders if Conor can be part of a new generation to take it on.
It’s a bit of a sleepy book, with a touch of suspense as secrets emerge from Birdeye’s past. I was slightly reminded of May Sarton’s Kinds of Love. I most appreciated the character study of Liv and her very different relationships with her daughters, who are approaching fifty: Mary is a capable lawyer in London, while Rose suffered oxygen deprivation at birth and is severely intellectually disabled. Since Liv’s illness, Mary has pressured her to make plans for Rose’s future and, ultimately, her own. The duty of care we bear towards others – blood family; the chosen family of friends and comrades, even pets – arises as a major theme. I’d recommend this to those who love small-town novels.
With thanks to Salt Publishing for the free copy for review.
& 20 Books of Summer, #20:
Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg
Alas, this proved to be another disappointment from the Observer’s 10 best new novelists feature (following How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica). The setup was promising: in 2008, Iris reeling from her break-up from Nathan and still grieving her father’s death in a car accident, goes to live at Breach House after a chance meeting with Hazel, one of the women’s commune’s residents. “Breach House was its own ecosystem, removed from the malfunctioning world of indecision and patriarchy.” Any attempts to mix with the outside world go awry, and the women gain a reputation as strange and difficult. I never got a handle on the secondary characters, who fill stock roles (the megalomaniac leader, the reckless one, the disgruntled one), and it all goes predictably homoerotic and then Lord of the Flies. The dual-timeline structure with Iris’s reflections from 10 years later adds little. An example of the commune plot done poorly, with shallow conclusions rather than deeper truths at play.
With thanks to Tinder Press for the free copy for review.
On this topic, I have also read:
Novels:
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
On my TBR:
O Sinners by Nicole Cuffy
We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston
Nonfiction:
Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
August Releases: Sarah Manguso (Fiction), Sarah Moss (Memoir), and Carl Phillips (Poetry)
Today I feature a new-to-me poet and two women writers whose careers I’ve followed devotedly but whose latest books – forthright yet slippery; their genre categories could easily be reversed – I found very emotionally difficult to read. Gruelling, almost, but admirable. Many rambling thoughts ensue. Then enjoy a nice poem.
Liars by Sarah Manguso
As part of a profile of Manguso and her oeuvre for Bookmarks magazine, I wrote a synopsis and surveyed critical opinion; what follow are additional subjective musings. I’ve read six of her nine books (all but the poetry and an obscure flash fiction collection) and I esteem her fragmentary, aphoristic prose, but on balance I’m fonder of her nonfiction. Had Liars been marketed as a diary of her marriage and divorce, Manguso might have been eviscerated for the indulgence and one-sided presentation. With the thinnest of autofiction layers, is it art?
Jane recounts her doomed marriage, from the early days of her relationship with John Bridges to the aftermath of his affair and their split. She is a writer and academic who sacrifices her career for his financially risky artistic pursuits. Especially once she has a baby, every domestic duty falls to her, while he keeps living like a selfish stag and gaslights her if she tries to complain, bringing up her history of mental illness. The concise vignettes condense 14+ years into 250 pages, which is a relief because beneath the sluggish progression is such repetition of type of experiences that it could feel endless. John’s last name might as well be Doe: The novel presents him – and thus all men – as despicable and useless, while women are effortlessly capable and, by exhausting themselves, achieve superhuman feats. This is what heterosexual marriage does to anyone, Manguso is arguing. Indeed, in a Guardian interview she characterized this as a “domestic abuse novel,” and elsewhere she has said that motherhood can be unlinked from patriarchy, but not marriage.
Let’s say I were to list my every grievance against my husband from the last 17+ years: every time he left dirty clothes on the bedroom floor (which is every day); every time he loaded the dishwasher inefficiently (which is every time, so he leaves it to me); every time he failed to seal a packet or jar or Tupperware properly (which – yeah, you get the picture) – and he’s one of the good guys, bumbling rather than egotistical! And he’d have his own list for me, too. This is just what we put up with to live with other people, right? John is definitely worse (“The difference between John and a fascist despot is one of degree, not type”). But it’s not edifying, for author or reader. There may be catharsis to airing every single complaint, but how does it help to stew in bitterness? Look at everything I went through and validate my anger.
There are bright spots: Jane’s unexpected transformation into a doting mother (but why must their son only ever be called “the child”?), her dedication to her cat, and the occasional dark humour:
So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.
Manguso’s aphoristic style makes for many quotably mordant sentences. My feelings vacillated wildly, from repulsion to gung-ho support; my rating likewise swung between extremes and settled in the middle. I felt that, as a feminist, I should wholeheartedly support a project of exposing wrongs. It’s easy to understand how helplessness leads to rage, and how, considering sunk costs, a partner would irrationally hope for a situation to improve. So I wasn’t as frustrated with Jane as some readers have been. But I didn’t like the crass sexual language, and on the whole I agreed with Parul Sehgal’s brilliant New Yorker review that the novel is so partial and the tone so astringent that it is impossible to love. 
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
And a quote from the Moss memoir (below) to link the two books: “Homes are places where vulnerable people are subject to bullying, violence and humiliation behind closed doors. Homes are places where a woman’s work is never done and she is always guilty.”
20 Books of Summer, #19:
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss
I’ve reviewed this memoir for Shelf Awareness (it’s coming out in the USA from Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 22nd) so will only give impressions, in rough chronological order:
Sarah Moss returns to nonfiction – YES!!!
Oh no, it’s in the second person. I’ve read too much of that recently. Fine for one story in a collection. A whole book? Not so sure. (Kirsty Logan got away with it, but only because The Unfamiliar is so short and meant to emphasize how matrescence makes you other.)
The constant second-guessing of memory via italicized asides that question or refute what has just been said; the weird nicknames (her father is “the Owl” and her mother “the Jumbly Girl”) – in short, the deliberate artifice – at first kept me from becoming submerged. This must be deliberate and yet meant it was initially a chore to pick up. It almost literally hurt to read. And yet there are some breathtakingly brilliant set pieces. Oh! when her mother’s gay friend Keith buys her a chocolate éclair and she hides it until it goes mouldy.
Once she starts discussing her childhood reading – what it did for her then and how she views it now – the book really came to life for me. And she very effectively contrasts the would-be happily ever after of generally getting better after eight years of disordered eating with her anorexia returning with a vengeance at age 46 – landing her in A&E in Dublin. (Oh! when she reads War and Peace over and over on a hospital bed and defiantly uses the clean toilets on another floor.) This crisis is narrated in the third person before a return to second person.
The tone shifts throughout the book, so that what threatens to be slightly cloying in the childhood section turns academically curious and then, somehow, despite the distancing pronouns, intimate. So much so that I found myself weeping through the last chapters over this lovely, intelligent woman’s ongoing struggles. As an overly cerebral person who often thinks it’s pesky to have to live in a body, I appreciated her probing of the body/mind divide; and as she tracks where her food issues came from, I couldn’t help but think about my sister’s years of eating disorders and my mother’s fear that it was all her fault.
Beyond Moss’s usual readers, I’d also recommend this to fans of Laura Freeman’s The Reading Cure and Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place.
Overall: shape-shifting, devastating, staunchly pragmatic. I’m not convinced it all hangs together (and I probably would have ended it at p. 255), but it’s still a unique model for transmuting life into art. 
With thanks to Picador for the free copy for review.
Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips
Phillips is a prolific poet I’d somehow never heard of. In fact, he won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his selected poetry volume. He’s gay and African American, and in his evocative verse he summons up landscapes and a variety of weather, including as a metaphor for emotions – guilt, shame, and regret. Looking back over broken relationships, he questions his memory.
Will I remember individual poems? Unlikely. But the sense of chilly, clear-eyed reflection, yes. (Sample poem below) 
With thanks to Carcanet for the advanced e-copy for review.
Record of Where a Wind Was
Wave-side, snow-side,
little stutter-skein of plovers
lifting, like a mind
of winter—
We’d been walking
the beach, its unevenness
made our bodies touch,
now and then, at
the shoulders mostly,
with that familiarity
that, because it sometimes
includes love, can
become confused with it,
though they remain
different animals. In my
head I played a game with
the waves called Weapon
of Choice, they kept choosing
forgiveness, like the only
answer, as to them
it was, maybe. It’s a violent
world. These, I said, I choose
these, putting my bare hands
through the air in front of me.
Any other August releases you’d recommend?
20 Books of Summer, 17–18: Suzanne Berne and Melissa Febos
Nearly there! I’ll have two more books to review for this challenge as part of roundups tomorrow and Saturday. Today I have a lesser-known novel by a Women’s Prize winner and a set of personal essays about body image and growing up female.
A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne (2001)
Berne won the Orange (Women’s) Prize for A Crime in the Neighbourhood in 1999. This is another slice of mild suburban suspense. The Boston-area Cook-Goldman household faces increasingly disruptive problems. Architect dad Howard is vilified for a new housing estate he’s planning, plus an affair that he had with a colleague a few years ago comes back to haunt him. Hotshot lawyer Mirella can’t get the work–life balance right, especially when she finds out she’s unexpectedly pregnant with twins at age 41. They hire a new nanny to wrangle their two under-fives, headstrong Pearl and developmentally delayed Jacob. If Randi Gill seems too good to be true, that’s because she’s a pathological liar. But hey, she’s great with kids.
It’s clear some Bad Stuff is going to happen to this family; the only questions are how bad and precisely what. Now, this is pretty much exactly what I want from my “summer reading”: super-readable plot- and character-driven fiction whose stakes are low (e.g., midlife malaise instead of war or genocide or whatever) and that veers more popular than literary and so can be devoured in large chunks. I really should have built more of that into my 20 Books plan! I read this much faster than I normally get through a book, but that meant the foreshadowing felt too prominent and I noticed some repetition, e.g., four or five references to purple loosestrife, which is a bit much even for those of us who like our wildflowers. It seemed a bit odd that the action was set back in the Clinton presidency; the references to the Lewinsky affair and Hillary’s “baking cookies” remark seemed to come out of nowhere. And seriously, why does the dog always have to suffer the consequences of humans’ stupid mistakes?!
This reminded me most of Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan and a bit of Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, while one late plot turn took me right back to The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller. While the Goodreads average rating of 2.93 seems pretty harsh, I can also see why fans of A Crime would have been disappointed. I probably won’t seek out any more of Berne’s fiction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Girlhood by Melissa Febos (2021)
I was deeply impressed by Febos’s Body Work (2022), a practical guide to crafting autobiographical narratives as a way of reckoning with the effects of trauma. Ironically, I engaged rather less with her own personal essays. One issue for me was that her highly sexualized experiences are a world away from mine. I don’t have her sense of always having had to perform for the male gaze, though maybe I’m fooling myself. Another was that it’s over 300 pages and only contains seven essays, so there were several pieces that felt endless. This was especially true of “The Mirror Test” (62 pp.) which is about double standards for girls as they played out in her simultaneous lack of confidence and slutty reputation, but randomly references The House of Mirth quite a lot; and “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” (74 pp.), which ponders why Febos has such trouble relaxing at a cuddle party and whether she killed off her ability to give physical consent through her years as a dominatrix.
“Wild America,” about her first lesbian experience and the way she came to love a perceived defect (freakishly large hands; they look perfectly normal to me in her author photo), and “Intrusions,” about her and other women’s experience with stalkers, worked a bit better. But my two favourites incorporated travel, a specific relationship, and a past versus present structure. “Thesmophoria” opens with her arriving in Rome for a mother–daughter vacation only to realize she told her mother the wrong month. Feeling guilty over the error, she remembers other instances when she valued her mother’s forgiveness, including when she would leave family celebrations to buy drugs. The allusions to Greek myth were neither here nor there for me, but the words about her mother’s unconditional love made me cry.
I also really liked “Les Calanques,” which again draws on her history of heroin addiction, comparing a strung-out college trip to Paris when she scored with a sweet gay boy named Ahmed with the self-disciplined routines and care for her body she’d learned by the time she returns to France for a writing retreat. This felt like a good model for how to write about one’s past self. “I spend so much time with that younger self, her savage despair and fleeting reliefs, that I start to feel as though she is here with me.” The prologue, “Scarification,” is a numbered list of how she got her scars, something Paul Auster also gives in Winter Journal. As if to insist that we can only ever experience life through our bodies.
Although I’d hoped to connect to this more, and ultimately felt it wasn’t really meant for me (and maybe I’m a deficient feminist), I did admire the range of strategies and themes so will keep it on the shelf as a model for approaching the art of the personal essay. I think I would probably prefer a memoir from Febos, but don’t need to read more about her sex work (Whip Smart), so might look into Abandon Me. If bisexuality and questions of consent are of interest, you might also like Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace, which I reviewed for BookBrowse. (Gift (secondhand) from my Christmas wish list last year)
20 Books of Summer, 14–16: Polly Atkin, Nan Shepherd and Susan Allen Toth
I’m still plugging away at the challenge. It’ll be down to the wire, but I should finish and review all 20 books by the 31st! Today I have a chronic illness memoir, a collection of poetry and prose pieces, and a reread of a cosy travel guide.
Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better by Polly Atkin (2023)
I was heartened to see this longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. It was a perfect opportunity to recognize the disabled/chronically ill experience of nature and the book achieves just what the award has recognised in recent years: the braiding together of life writing and place-based observation. (Wainwright has also done a great job on diversity this year: there are three books by BIPOC and five by women on the nature writing shortlist alone.)
Polly Atkin knew something was different about her body from a young age. She broke bones all the time, her first at 18 months when her older brother ran into her on his bicycle. But it wasn’t until her thirties that she knew what was wrong – Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and haemochromatosis – and developed strategies to mitigate the daily pain and the drains on her energy and mobility. “Correct diagnosis makes lives bearable,” she writes. “It gives you access to the right treatment. It gives you agency.”
The book assembles long-ish fragments, snippets from different points of her past alternating with what she sees on rambles near her home in Grasmere. She writes in some depth about Lake District literature: Thomas De Quincey as well as the Wordsworths – Atkin’s previous book is a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth that spotlights her experience with illness. In describing the desperately polluted state of Windermere, Atkin draws parallels with her condition (“Now I recognise my body as a precarious ecosystem”). Although she spurns the notion of the “Nature Cure,” swimming is a valuable therapy for her.
Theme justifies form here: “This is the chronic life, lived as repetition and variance, as sedimentation of broken moments, not as a linear progression.” For me, there was a bit too much particularity; if you don’t connect to the points of reference, there’s no way in and the danger arises of it all feeling indulgent. Besides, by the time I opened this I’d already read two Ehlers-Danlos memoirs (All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett and Floppy by Alyssa Graybeal) and another reference soon came my way in The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke. So overfamiliarity was a problem. And by the time I forced myself to pick this off of my set-aside shelf and finish it, I’d read Nina Lohman’s stellar The Body Alone. For those newer to reading about chronic illness, though, especially if you also have an interest in the Lakes, it could be an eye-opener.
With thanks to Sceptre (Hodder) for the free copy for review.
Selected Prose & Poetry by Nan Shepherd (2023)
I’d read and enjoyed Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, which has surged in popularity as an early modern nature writing classic thanks to Robert Macfarlane et al. I’m not sure I’d go as far as the executor of the Nan Shepherd Estate, though, who describes her in the Preface as “Taylor Swift in hiking boots.” The pieces reprinted here are from her one published book of poems, In the Cairngorms, and the mixed-genre collection Wild Geese. There is also a 28-page “novella,” Descent from the Cross. After World War I, Elizabeth, a workers’ rights organiser for a paper mill, marries a shell-shocked veteran who wants to write a book but isn’t sure he has either the genius or the dedication. It’s interesting that Shepherd would write about a situation where the wife has the economic upper hand, but the tragedy of the sickly failed author put me in mind of George Gissing or D.H. Lawrence, so didn’t feel fresh. Going by length alone, I would have called this a short story, but I understand why it would be designated a novella, for the scope.
None of the miniature essays – field observations and character studies – stood out to me. About half of the book is given over to poetry. As with the nature writing, there is a feeling of mountain desolation. There are a lot of religious references and hints of the mystical, as in “The Bush,” which opens “In that pure ecstasy of light / The bush is burning bright. / Its substance is consumed away / And only form doth stay”. It’s a mixed bag: some feels very old-fashioned and sentimental, with every other line or, worse, every line rhyming, and some archaic wording and rather impenetrable Scots dialect. It could have been written 100 years before, by Robert Burns if not William Blake. But every so often there is a flash of brilliance. “Blackbird in Snow” is quite a nice one, and reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.” I even found the cryptic lines from “Real Presence” that inspired a song on David Gray’s Skellig. My favourite poem by far was:
Overall, this didn’t engage me; it’s only for Shepherd fanatics and completists. (Won from Galileo Publishers in a Twitter giveaway)
England As You Like It: An Independent Traveler’s Companion by Susan Allen Toth (1995)
A reread. As I was getting ready to go overseas for the first time in the summer of 2003, Toth’s trilogy of memoirs whetted my appetite for travel in Britain. (They’re on my Landmark Books in My Life, Part II list.) This is the middle book and probably the least interesting in that it mostly recounts stays in particular favourite locations, such as Dorset, the Highlands, and various sites in Cornwall. However, I’ve never forgotten her “thumbprint theory,” which means staying a week or more in an area no larger than her thumb covers on a large-scale map, driving an hour or less for day trips. Not for her those cram-it-all-in trips where you race through multiple countries in a week (I have American friends who did Paris, London and Rome within six days, or five countries in eight days; blame it on stingy vacation policies, I guess). Instead, she wants to really bed into one place and have the time to make serendipitous discoveries such as an obscure museum or a rare opening of a private garden.
I most liked the early general chapters about how to make air travel bearable, her obsession with maps, her preference for self-catering, and her tendency to take home edible souvenirs. Of course, all the “Floating Facts” are hopelessly out-of-date. This being the early to mid-1990s, she had to order paper catalogues to browse cottage options (I still did this for honeymoon prep in 2006–7) and make international phone calls to book accommodation. She recommends renting somewhere from the National Trust or Landmark Trust. Ordnance Survey maps could be special ordered from the British Travel Bookshop in New York City. Entry fees averaged a few pounds. It’s all so quaint! An Anglo-American time capsule of sorts. I’ve always sensed a kindred spirit in Toth, and those whose taste runs toward the old-fashioned will probably also find her a charming tour guide. I’ve also reviewed the third book, England for All Seasons. (Free from The Book Thing of Baltimore)
20 Books of Summer, 11–13: Campbell, Julavits, Lu
Two solid servings of women’s life writing plus a novel about a Chinese woman stuck in roles she’s not sure she wants anymore.
Thunderstone: A true story of losing one home and discovering another by Nancy Campbell (2022)
Just before Covid hit, Campbell’s partner Anna had a partially disabling stroke. They had to adjust to lockdown and the rigours of Anna’s at-home care at once. It was complicated in that Campbell was already halfway out the door: after 10 years, their relationship had run its course and she knew it was time to go, but guilt lingered about abandoning Anna at her most vulnerable (“How dare I leave someone who needed me”). That is the backdrop to a quiet book largely formed of a diary spanning June to September 2021. Campbell recounts settling into a caravan by the canal and railway line in Oxford, getting plenty of help from friends and neighbours but also finding her own inner resources and enjoying her natural setting.
The title refers to a fossil that has been considered a talisman in various cultures, and she needed the good luck during a period that involved accidental carbon monoxide poisoning and surgery for an ovarian abnormality (but it didn’t protect her books, which were all destroyed in a leaking shipping container – the horror!). I most enjoyed the longer entries where she muses on “All the potential lives I moved on from” during 20 years in Oxford and elsewhere, which makes me think that I would have preferred a more traditional memoir by her. Covid narratives feel really dated now, unfortunately. (New (bargain) purchase from Hungerford Bookshop with birthday voucher)
Directions to Myself: A Memoir by Heidi Julavits (2023)
Julavits is a novelist and founding editor of The Believer. I loved her non-standard diary, The Folded Clock, back in 2017, so jumped at the chance to read her new memoir but then took more a year over reading it. The U.S. subtitle, “A Memoir of Four Years,” captures the focus: the change in her son from age five to age nine – from little boy to full-fledged individual. In later sections he sounds so like my American nephew with his Fortnite obsession and lawyerly levels of argumentation and self-justification. A famous author once told Julavits that writers should not have children because each one represents a book they will not write. This book is a rebuttal: something she could not have written without having had her son. Home is a New York City apartment near the Columbia University campus where she teaches – in fact, directly opposite a dorm at which rape allegations broke out – but more often the setting is their Maine vacations, where coastal navigation is a metaphor for traversing life.
Mostly the memoir takes readers through everyday conversations the author has with friends and family about situations of inequality or harassment. Through her words she tries to gently steer her son towards more open-minded ideas about gender roles. She also entrances him and his sleepover friends with a real-life horror story about being chased through the French countryside by a man in a car. The tenor of her musings appealed to me, but already the details are fading. I suspect this will mean much more to a parent.
With thanks to Bloomsbury for the free copy for review.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu (2023)
The title character holds a traditional position in her Chinese village, performing mourning at ceremonies for the dead. It’s a steady source of income for her and her husband, but her career choice has stigma attached: “Now that I brought bad luck and I smelt of the dead, nobody would step into our house to play mah-jong or chat.” Exotic as the setup might seem at first, it underpins a familiar story of a woman caught in frustrating relationships and situations. A very readable but plain style to this McKitterick Prize winner.
With thanks to the Society of Authors for the free copy.
July Releases, I: Books by Nina Lohman and Ricky Ray for Disability Pride Month
The Wellcome Book Prize (for health- and medicine-related books) and the Barbellion Prize (for representations of disability and/or chronic illness) are much missed, but I continue to be drawn to their highlighted themes in my reading. This is the first year that I’ve been aware of July as Disability Pride Month, though it’s been a thing since 1990 in the USA and 2015 in the UK. My first set of July releases – I have reviews of three novels coming up tomorrow – consists of a nonlinear memoir interrogating life with chronic pain and a chronically ill poet’s collection in which an old dog is an example of grace through suffering.
The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain by Nina Lohman
For well over a decade, Nina Lohman has endured Chronic Daily Headaches – when a doctor presented her with this phrase, she remarks, it was not so much a diagnosis as a description. Having a clinical term for her extreme pain did nothing to solve it; no treatment she has tried has helped much either, from pharmaceuticals to acupuncture. (Doctors think they’re breaking new ground if they suggest ice packs or elevating her neck.) Like Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, this documents a quest with no natural end. Lohman’s health fluctuates, and medical professionals and family and friends minimize her pain because she is able to pass as well, to carry out the daily tasks of raising two children.
The subtitle is apt for a work that is fragmentary and not driven by chronology. Had Cataloguing Pain not already been taken (by Allison Blevins), it might have been a perfect title. Some of Lohman’s short pieces read like poems, including erasure poems based on her medical notes. Repeated headings demonstrate a desire to organise her illness so as to make sense of it: “A Primer,” “Classifications” and “Perhaps” musings. She dwells on the names of things – shades of colours, groups of animals – while she longs for a vocabulary tailored to her own circumstances. Imagined monologues by doctors, friends and her husband (“He”) show pain has not turned her insular; she has empathy even when people act in hurtful ways.
One aspect of the book that I found particularly interesting is that Lohman, though not raised with Christian beliefs, studied theology at university level. Doctrines of the Fall bringing anguish and the Cross offering atonement are logical to her yet feel irrelevant to her situation. She bristles when a religious friend suggests that pain might be “her cross to bear.” Lohman admits she has given up hope on ever being free of pain, so finds resonance with poet Christian Wiman, who has been living with cancer for decades and whose work is equally infused with pain and faith.
It’s a journalistic as well as personal narrative, in the tradition of Anne Boyer, Sinéad Gleeson and Susan Sontag, shifting between modes and registers as Lohman gives a history of opiates, records of her pregnancies, and précis of philosophical understandings of suffering. “Theorizing can only take me so far,” she acknowledges, toward comprehending bodily experiences that defy language. And yet she employs words exquisitely, marshalling metaphors though they’re inadequate. The tone flows from enraged to resigned to cynical and back as she depicts the helplessness of women in a medical system that ignores their pain. Especially if you have enjoyed work by any of the authors I mention above, I highly recommend this debut: it’s sure to be one of my books of the year.
Published by the University of Iowa Press. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the free advanced e-copy for review.
The Soul We Share: Life with Earth and an Old Brown Dog by Ricky Ray
New England poet Ricky Ray describes himself as an “eco-mystic” and is the author of several previous works. Maura Dooley chose this as the Aryamati Collection Prize winner in 2023. As in Birds Knit My Ribs Together by Phil Barnett, nature is a source of comfort in a life complicated by chronic illness. In “Pain: 8 on a Scale out of 10,” Ray explains how “Some days, I never make it out of my head, / that coal-eyed melon … The impinged nerves crack their whips / within my animal pelt”. An accidental overdose and depression are matter-of-fact components of the poet’s history. While uxorious, he regrets that he may never become a father. And yet this couplet expresses deep pleasure in life:
(Dis)ability
Some days, my body is so beautiful
I can’t believe I get to live here.
His elderly rescue dog Addie is his beloved companion, and the delight she takes in physical existence despite advancing cancer is a model to him: “she still has a lot / to teach me about aging, about ignoring it, about how to throw my body— / even when it fails me, even when it hurts like hell—headlong into joy.” Multiple poems remember particular walks with her, such as in a Connecticut forest. He even gets a tutorial from her in how to dig a hole. Later on, he remarks as if to her, “Forgive me, I’m human, / we’re slow to learn, quick to forget— / it could be said we live too long / to appreciate each drop of time in the heart’s well.”
If his primary engagement with the nonhuman world is via a pet, Ray also widens the scope to include environmental plight: “you look up and extinction’s / already guzzling half the bestiary, / You think, / God, what have I done? / And the God in you answers: / harm, now what will you do?” This sense of responsibility meeting resolution echoes throughout the book. Ache is a spur to seek remedies; “I learned that hurt inducts all painfolk as conspirators // in the craft of healing.” The prose poems were a bit long and ranty for me (e.g., “Identity Earth: A Brief Biography of Our Planetary Self” goes on for more than six pages) and overall I found the book a little sentimental and New Age-adjacent. However, the poems about Addie are undeniably touching, and perfect for fans of Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs.
With thanks to Fly on the Wall Press for the free copy for review.
Have you read anything to tie into Disability Pride Month?
The Best Books from the First Half of 2024
Hard to believe, but it’s that time of year already! It’s the eighth year in a row that I’ve been making a first-half superlatives list. It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year rundown, but for now, these are my 18 favourite 2024 releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top 20% of my current-year reading). One is a bonus in that it won’t actually be published until August; six happen to be books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness. Pictured below are the ones I read in print; all the others were e-copies. Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: This nuanced debut novel alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and time travel sci-fi, making clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress. The narrator is a “bridge” helping to resettle a Victorian polar explorer in near-future London. You just have to suspend disbelief and go with it. Bradley’s descriptive prose is memorable but never quirky for the sake of it. I haven’t had so much fun with a book since Romantic Comedy. A witty, sexy, off-kilter gem.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj: Darraj’s second novel-in-stories is a shimmering composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. Each of the stories (four in the first person, five in the third person) spotlights a particular character. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s.
Piglet by Lottie Hazell: The protagonist works for a cookbook publisher, loves to cook, and has a history of overeating during psychological distress. When her fiancé blindsides her with a confession 13 days before their wedding, she returns to binge eating, dress fittings be damned. Food is also a sign of her education and class pretensions. Uncomfortable themes, but I kept reading in fascinated horror because Hazell writes absolutely incredible scenes. This is also about what women are allowed to want, and how they are expected to settle.
Wellness by Nathan Hill: A state-of-the-nation novel filtered through one Chicago family experiencing midlife and marital crises: underperforming academic Jack; his wife Elizabeth, a placebo researcher at Wellness; and their YouTube-obsessed son Toby. They’ve recently invested their life savings in a new condo. The addictive and spot-on novel asks questions about authenticity, purpose, and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? Hill is clearly fascinated with psychological experimentation but also turns it to humorous effect.
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim: Over 2.5 days in June 2020, a Korean American family (mother Hannah and 20-year-old twins Mia and John, home from college for the lockdown) investigates, on their own and with the help of police and tip-offs, what happened to the father, Adam, who’d been at River Falls Park with the severely disabled 14-year-old son, Eugene, who is autistic and has mosaic Angelman syndrome. Mia narrates, and it’s a pleasure spending time with her quick, systematic brain as she considers each theory and red herring.
Company by Shannon Sanders: This energetic debut novel in 13 linked stories traces several generations of the Collins clan, whose experiences at once exemplify African American gentrification and evoke timeless patterns of parental legacy and sibling jealousy. Sisters Cassandra, Fay, Lee and Suzette grew up at their parents’ Atlantic City jazz club before going their separate ways. We revisit relatives at different points in their lives, mostly between the 1990s and the present day. Celebration scenes make for memorable moments.
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang (illus. LeUyen Pham): A super-cute teen story with gorgeous illustrations, including lots of pink and red to suit the theme. We follow Vietnamese-American Valentina through high school as she plays host to an internal debate between cynicism and romanticism. Ever since her mother left, she’s longed to believe in romance but feared that love is a doomed prospect for her family. The Asian community of Oakland, California and a new hobby of lion dancing provide engrossing cultural detail.
Nonfiction
Intervals by Marianne Brooker: An extended essay about her mother’s protracted death with multiple sclerosis and the issues it brought up around disability, poverty, and inequality of access to medical care and services. Brooker decries the injustice of the wealthy having the option of travelling to Dignitas in Switzerland for an assisted death, whereas her single mother had so such relief in sight. Brooker’s description of the vigil of the last days, like her account of her vivacious mother’s life, is both tender and unflinching.
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s Manhattan apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell. Throughout the book, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell’s death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger: Poignant interlocking essays about female friendship. Love and death coexist here. Dancyger’s first best friend was her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20. “Sad Girls” takes on Sylvia Plath fandom. Dancyger also maps her bisexuality and ponders whether to have a child. She is nostalgic for the freedom of being young and unsupervised in New York City and Europe. A sensitive interrogation of women’s relationships, perfect for fans of Melissa Febos and Emma Straub.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti: Heti put 10 years of diary contents into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence, and then ruthlessly culled the results. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of her oeuvre: obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity, but also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding chronology. Remarkably, the collage approach produces a genuine, crystalline vision of the self. A sui generis work of life writing.
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie: This impassioned auto/biographical collage combines the strengths of oral history, group biography and a fragmented memoir. “Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key. As readers, we watch her life, her thinking and the book all take shape. It’s intimate and empathetic, with layers of stories that reflect diversity of experience.
The Age of Loneliness: Essays by Laura Marris: A perceptive, moving collection of nine braided essays linking personal experience of loss with the climate crisis. “Cancerine” is a strong example. Cancer, the sign of the crab, was her father’s cause of death; horseshoe crabs were ground into fertilizer in the 19th century, and their blood is still harvested for biomedical testing. Driven by curiosity and environmental conscience, these reflective pieces reminiscent of Helen Macdonald’s longform journalism ponder human responsibility and resilience. [Graywolf Press, 6 August]
Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie: I’ve not had much success with Rushdie’s fiction, but this is excellent, with intriguing side tendrils and lots of quotable lines. It traces lead-up and aftermath; unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some medical detail about his recovery, you get the sense of him more as an unchanging mind and a resolute will. The most remarkable section imagines dialogues between him and his imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations.
Poetry
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali: In this poised debut collection by a Muslim poet, spiritual enlightenment is a female, embodied experience, mediated by the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths. Ali’s poems hymn women’s bodies, desire, and motherhood. She blurs the line between human and divine with her allusions to the Quran. Ambivalence towards faith is clear in the alliteration-laden verse that recalls Kaveh Akbar’s. Wordplay, floral metaphors, and multiple ghazals make for dazzling language.
Baby Schema by Isabel Galleymore: A slant-wise look at environmental crisis and an impending decision about motherhood. The title comes from Konrad Lorenz’s identification of features that invite nurture. Galleymore edges towards the satirical fantasies of Caroline Bird or Patricia Lockwood as she imagines alternative scenarios of caregiving. What is worthy of maternal concern? Does cuteness merit survival? Extinction and eco-grief on the one hand, yes, but the implacability of biological cycles on the other. Sardonic yet humane.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez: This debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming, tornadoes and cicadas. But her Kansas isn’t all rose-tinted nostalgia; there’s an edge of sadness and danger. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. In “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator turns sinister. She also takes inspiration from headlines. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for. (Full review to come.)
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick: Motherhood and the body are overarching themes. The speaker experiences multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own, while the second long section is about her husband transitioning. Bird metaphors are inescapable. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is dark humour and one-line rejoinders. If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further.
Two of the novels above were among my Most Anticipated books of the year. I’ve now read 10 of the 12 on that list and DNFed another (the Sarah Perry), which just leaves Memory Piece by Lisa Ko to find – though others’ responses make me think it might not be worthwhile to do so. I sometimes wonder if designating a book as anticipated or a priority is a kiss of death, as I was at least somewhat disappointed with over half of my choices this time.
In the second part of the year, I’m looking forward to new releases from Rachel Clarke, Sarah Manguso, Charlotte Mendelson, Richard Powers, Sally Rooney, Elizabeth Strout and Evie Wyld.
What 2024 releases should I catch up on? What’s in your sights for the rest of the year?
June Releases by Caroline Bird, Kathleen Jamie, Glynnis MacNicol and Naomi Westerman
These four books by women all incorporate life writing to an extent. Although the forms differ, a common theme – as in the other June releases I’ve reviewed, Sandwich and Others Like Me – is grappling with what a woman’s life should be, especially for those who have taken an unconventional path (i.e. are queer or childless) or are in midlife or later. I’ve got a poet up to her usual surreal shenanigans but with a new focus on lesbian parenting; a hybrid collection of poetry and prose giving snapshots of nature in crisis; an account of a writer’s hedonistic month in pandemic-era Paris; and mordant essays about death culture.
Ambush at Still Lake by Caroline Bird
Caroline Bird has become one of my favourite contemporary poets over the past few years. Her verse is joyously cheeky and absurdist. A great way to sample it is via her selected poems, Rookie. This seventh collection is muted by age and circumstance – multiple weddings and a baby – but still hilarious in places. Instead of rehab or hospital as in In These Days of Prohibition, the setting is mostly the domestic sphere. Even here, bizarre things happen. The police burst in at 4 a.m. for no particular reason; search algorithms and the baby monitor go haywire. Her brother calls to deliver a paranoid rant (in “Up and at ’Em”), while Nannie Edna’s dying wish is to dangle her great-grandson from her apartment window (in “Last Rites”). The clinic calls to announce that their sperm donor was a serial killer – then ‘oops, wrong vial, never mind!’ A toddler son’s strange and megalomaniac demands direct their days. My two favourites were “Ants,” in which a kitchen infestation signals general chaos, and “The Frozen Aisle,” in which a couple scrambles to finish the grocery shop and get home to bed before a rare horny moment passes. A lesbian pulp fiction cover, mischievous wit and topics of addiction and queer parenting: this is not your average poetry.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
A sample poem:
Siblings
A woman gave birth
to the reincarnation
of Gilbert and Sullivan
or rather, two reincarnations:
one Gilbert, one Sullivan.
What are the odds
of both being resummoned
by the same womb
when they could’ve been
a blue dart frog
and a supply teacher
on separate continents?
Yet here they were, squidged
into a tandem pushchair
with their best work
behind them, still smarting
from the critical reception
of their final opera
described as ‘but an echo’
of earlier collaborations.
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
As she approached age 60, Kathleen Jamie found her style changing. Whereas her other essay collections alternate extended nature or travel pieces with few-page vignettes, Cairn eschews longer material and instead alternates poems with micro-essays on climate crisis and outdoor experiences. In the prologue she calls these “distillations and observations. Testimonies” that she has assembled into “A cairn of sorts.”
As in Surfacing, she writes many of the autobiographical fragments in the second person. The book is melancholy at times, haunted by all that has been lost and will be lost in the future:
What do we sense on the moor but ghost folk,
ghost deer, even ghost wolf. The path itself is a
phantom, almost erased in ling and yellow tormentil (from “Moor”)
In “The Bass Rock,” Jamie laments the effect that bird flu has had on this famous gannet colony and wishes desperately for better news:
The light glances on the water. The haze clears, and now the rock is visible; it looks depleted. But hallelujah, a pennant of twenty-odd gannets is passing, flying strongly, now rising now falling They’ll be Bass Rock birds. What use the summer sunlight, if it can’t gleam on a gannet’s back? You can only hope next year will be different. Stay alive! You call after the flying birds. Stay alive!
Natural wonders remind her of her own mortality and the insignificance of human life against deep time. “I can imagine the world going on without me, which one doesn’t at 30.” She questions the value of poetry in a time of emergency: “If we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive. How to write a lyric poem?” (from “Summer”). The same could be said of any human endeavour in the face of extinction: We question the point but still we continue.
My two favourite pieces were “The Handover,” about going on an environmental march with her son and his friends in Glasgow and comparing it with the protests of her time (Greenham Common and nuclear disarmament) – doom and gloom was ever thus – and the title poem, which piles natural image on image like a cone of stones. Although I prefer the depth of Jamie’s other books to the breadth of this one, she is an invaluable nature writer for her wisdom and eloquence, and I am grateful we have heard from her again after five years.
With thanks to Sort Of Books for the free copy for review.
I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris by Glynnis MacNicol
I loved New York City freelance writer Glynnis MacNicol’s No One Tells You This (2018), which approached her 40th year as an adventure into the unknown. This second memoir is similarly frank and intrepid as MacNicol examines the unconscious rules that people set for women in their mid-forties and gleefully flouts them, remaining single and childfree and delighting in the freedom that allows her to book a month in Paris on a whim. She knows that she is an anomaly for being “untethered”; “I am ready for anything. To be anyone.”
This takes place in August 2021, when some pandemic restrictions were still in force, and she found the city – a frequent destination for her over the years – drained of locals, who were all en vacances, and largely empty of tourists, too. Although there was still a queue for the Mona Lisa, she otherwise found the Louvre very quiet, and could ride her borrowed bike through the streets without having to look out for cars. She and her single girlfriends met for rosé-soaked brunches and picnics, joined outdoor dance parties and took an island break.
And then there was the sex. MacNicol joined a hook-up app called Fruitz and met all sorts of men. She refused to believe that, just because she was 46 going on 47, she should be invisible or demure. “All the attention feels like pure oxygen. Anything is possible.” Seeing herself through the eyes of an enraptured 27-year-old Italian reminded her that her body was beautiful even if it wasn’t what she remembered from her twenties (“there is, on average, a five-year gap between current me being able to enjoy the me in the photos”). The book’s title is something she wrote while messaging with one of her potential partners.
As I wrote yesterday about Others Like Me, there are plenty of childless role models but you may have to look a bit harder for them. MacNicol does so by tracking down the Paris haunts of women writers such as Edith Wharton and Colette. She also interrogates this idea of women living a life of pleasure by researching the “odalisque” in 18th- and 19th-century art, as in the François Boucher painting on the cover. This was fun, provocative and thoughtful all at once; well worth seeking out for summer reading and armchair travelling.
(Read via Edelweiss) Published in the USA by Penguin Life/Random House.
Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief & Bereavement across Cultures by Naomi Westerman
Like Erica Buist (This Party’s Dead) and Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?), playwright Naomi Westerman finds the comical side of death. Part of 404 Ink’s Inklings series (“Big ideas, pocket-sized books” – perfect for anyone looking for short nonfiction for Novellas in November!), this is a collection of short essays about her own experiences of bereavement as well as her anthropological research into rituals and beliefs around death. “The Rat King of South London” is about her father’s sudden death from an abdominal aneurysm. An instantaneous death is a good one, she contends. More than 160,000 people die every day, and what to do with all those bodies is a serious question. A subversive sense of humour is there right from the start, as she gives a rundown of interment options. “Mummification: Beloved by Ancient Egyptians and small children going through their Ancient Egypt phase, it’s a classic for a reason!” Meanwhile, she legally owns her father’s plot so also buries dead pet rats there.
Other essays are about taking her mother’s ashes along on world travels, the funeral industry and “red market” sales of body parts, grief as a theme in horror films, the fetishization of dead female bodies, Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities, and true crime obsession. In “Batman,” an excerpt from one of her plays, she goes to have a terrible cup of tea with the man she believes to be responsible for her mother’s death – a violent one, after leaving an abusive relationship. She also used the play to host an on-stage memorial for her mother since she wasn’t able to sit shiva. In the final title essay, Westerman tours lots of death cafés and finds comfort in shared experiences. These pieces are all breezy, amusing and easy to read, so it’s a shame that this small press didn’t achieve proper proofreading, making for a rather sloppy text, and that the content was overall too familiar for me.
With thanks to 404 Ink and publicist Claire Maxwell for the free copy for review.
Does one or more of these catch your eye?
What June releases can you recommend?
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie
I’ve read quite a lot about matrescence and motherhood so far this year, and I value these women authors’ perspectives on their experiences. There is much that resonates with me as I look back to my relationships with my parents and observe how my sister, brother-in-law and friends are raising their children. Yet as I read of the joys and struggles of parenthood, I do sometimes think, what about the rest of us? That’s the question that drove Nicole Louie to write this impassioned book, which combines the strengths of an oral history, a group biography and a fragmented memoir. Like me, she was in search of role models, and found plenty of them – first on the library shelves and then in daily life by interviewing women she encountered through work or via social media.
The 14 Q&As, shaped into first-person narratives, are interspersed with Louie’s own story, creating a chorus of voices advocating for women’s freedom. The particulars of their situations vary widely. A Venezuelan graphic designer with MS doesn’t want to have a baby to try to fill a perceived lack. A blind Canadian writer hopes for children but knows it may be too complicated on her own. A Ghanaian asexual woman confronts her culture’s traditional expectations of woman. A British nurse in her sixties is philosophical about not having a long-term relationship at the right time, and focuses instead on the thousands of people she’s been able to care for.
The subjects come from Iceland, Peru, the Isle of Man; they are undecided, living with illness or disability, longing but unpartnered, or utterly convinced that motherhood is not for them. Their reasons are logical, psychological, personal and/or environmental, and so many of their conclusions rang true for me:
I just want to make the most of what’s here now instead of always having to long for something else I don’t already have.
I have this strong core intent to be useful to society. To channel as much energy into it as I would put into raising two children … You can’t experience everything available to you in life. So you make choices, and you decide which paths to take and which ones to leave behind without trying. And that’s okay. What’s important is to move forward with intent.
Louie herself has an interesting background: she’s Brazilian but has lived in Sweden, the UK and Ireland. Her work as a copywriter and translator has taken her behind the scenes in training AI. She first had to give serious thought to the question of becoming a mother in 2009, when it became an issue in her first marriage. But, really, she’d known for a long time that it didn’t appeal to her – at age six she was given a doll whose tummy opened to reveal a baby and quickly exchanged that toy for another. A late diagnosis of PCOS and a complicated relationship with her own mother only reinforced a clear conviction.
Other works that I’ve encountered on childlessness, such as Childless Voices by Lorna Gibb (2019) and No One Talks about This Stuff: Twenty-Two Stories of Almost Parenthood, ed. Kat Brown (2024), are heavily weighted towards infertility. Here the spotlight is much more on being childfree, although the blurb is inclusive, speaking of “women who are not mothers by choice, infertility, circumstance or ambivalence.” (I love the inclusion of that final word.)
“Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key for her. As readers, then, we have the honour of watching her life, her thinking and the book all take shape simultaneously in the narrative. A lovely point to mention is that Molly Peacock (The Analyst and A Friend Sails in on a Poem) mentored her throughout the composition process.
Intimate and empathetic, Others Like Me is also elegantly structured, with layers of stories that reflect diversity and the intersectionality of challenges. This auto/biographical collage of life without children will be reassuring for many, and a learning opportunity for others. I’m so glad it exists.
With thanks to Nicole Louie and Dialogue Books for the proof copy for review.
Buy Others Like Me from Bookshop.org in the UK [affiliate link]
20 Books of Summer, 5: A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson
Journalist and popular historian Juliet Nicolson is Vita Sackville-West’s granddaughter and one of the few remaining guardians of her living memory. This 2015 family memoir chronicles the lives of seven (eight, really) generations of women and travels from Malaga in the 1830s to present-day England. Nicolson acknowledges the inherited privilege that has typified this clan since the time of Vita’s grandmother but prefers to emphasize the roles that place and talent have played. It is enough of a biography of Vita to have won a Bisexual Book Award but, even though Vita only had sons, the focus is on mother–daughter bonds and how values and experiences have recurred across nearly two centuries.
First came Pepita, who rose from poverty in southern Spain to be a legendary dancer (“the Beyoncé of her day,” Nicolson quipped at an online event I attended – see below) and catch the eye of an English diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West, at a performance in Paris. Although Pepita was already married to her dancing teacher, she shook off her controlling mother and became Sackville-West’s longtime mistress, bearing him seven children. They could all have been disinherited for illegitimacy, however, had Pepita’s daughter Victoria not secured the link – and access to the family estate, Knole – by marrying her cousin, young Lionel Sackville-West. Vita wrote in Pepita, her joint biography of her mother and grandmother, “My mother appears to have been born with the faculty of attracting the most peculiar and improbable happenings,” such as a proposal of marriage from the recently widowed U.S. president, Chester Arthur, when she accompanied her father to Washington, DC.
Vita is the book’s presiding spirit and pivot point, but I already knew a lot about her from reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography plus two of her novels, so this material was too familiar. The fact that we then leap from daughters to a daughter-in-law (Nicolson’s mother, Philippa Tennyson-d’Eyncourt – these figures are all posher than posh!) is unfortunate as it dilutes the theme. However, Nicolson gives a behind-the-scenes look at Sissinghurst and the marriages between Vita and Harold, loving but also a cover for same-sex relationships for both of them; and Nigel and Philippa, which was a disaster almost from the start. Nicolson is also brave to admit the alcoholism that she subconsciously received from her mother. Philippa died at 58, but by admitting she had a problem Nicolson was able to get help and turn things around. Two generations followed: her two daughters and one granddaughter, who is now 11.
Nicolson sees patterns repeating across the generations: emotional abandonment by parents, “the lack of confidence, the fear of failure, and the seeking of approval where there was none” as well as “writing about the life and work of an earlier generation.” She hopes that with this book she has marked the arrival of “an increasingly tolerant and accepting generation, one that is not afraid to learn from the mistakes of the past and is determined not to repeat them”. (Fun but unrelated fact: Penelope Fitzgerald was one of Nicolson’s teachers.)
On the staircase leading up to Vita’s study in the tower, September 2009.
I visited Sissinghurst in 2009 – I can’t believe I haven’t been back in the past 15 years – and when we briefly lived in Sevenoaks in 2012 we also went to Knole. Both are magical places, especially Sissinghurst. For a few years there I was on a kick of reading a lot by and about Vita (I can recommend No Signposts in the Sea) and I also absorbed a fair bit via Adam Nicolson’s books (that’s Juliet’s brother) and his wife Sarah Raven’s – her recipes are to die for, and she’s kept up the gardens in a way that would make Vita proud. So I’d say it probably helps to have an existing interest in the family, but it should be a reasonably engrossing read in any case. (Free from a neighbour)
Yesterday I watched “The Inspiration of Vita Sackville-West,” a recording of an RSL event held at the London Library in October that was aired to tie in with their annual Dalloway Day as well as the 95th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (for which Vita was a model) and, of course, Pride Month. The panelists were Juliet Nicolson; trans novelist Shola von Reinhold, whose LOTE (2020) won the Republic of Consciousness and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes; fashion critic Charlie Porter; and writer Olivia Laing. The discussion was expertly chaired by Shahidha Bari, an academic, fashion writer and presenter of BBC Two’s Inside Culture. She opened by asking each speaker to define Vita in one word. Nicolson chose “lover,” which von Reinhold echoed. Porter said “physical.” Laing cheated with a made-up compound word: “androgynous-aristocratic-aesthete.”
And the conversation went on from there. Nicolson spoke of her grandmother as a formidable woman, tall and tobacco-scented, and remembered the exotic treasures she and her siblings found in Vita’s tower study, such as a bottle of emerald-green nail polish. She described Vita as enigmatic and representing duality: she was born a Victorian but has been embraced by modernist and queer studies; she was conventional in some ways, but also a rebel. Porter has written about fashion and the Bloomsbury circle, with Woolf as one of his subjects, so he thinks about Vita mostly as a muse. He read from Vita’s letter to Harold describing meeting Woolf, whom she thought “quite old” and “atrociously dressed.” Nonetheless, she’d lost her heart. Woolf in her turn commented on Vita’s moustache, which was likely a sign of her Spanish heritage rather than excess testosterone as some have theorized.
For von Reinhold, Vita is an early example of androgyny, a precursor to today’s trans and nonbinary identities. Laing, who has recently published a book on gardening, focused on Vita as a garden writer and designer. She said she doesn’t really value Vita’s novels but thinks her garden books (collections of her Observer columns) are extraordinary and read a passage in which she dreamt up the famous White Garden she would create at Sissinghurst (I read a kinda crummy novel about it a few years ago, The White Garden by Stephanie Barron).
The event gave a very good sense of Vita as a person but not as a writer. Audience questions brought up her poetry (oh God, it’s awful!) and travel books but that was as far as it went, and there was no discussion of the novels. Nicolson mentioned Pepita in passing but mostly talked about Portrait of a Marriage, which was half written by Vita and then finished by Nigel, a publisher (he was half of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, aka W&N). He had the courage to reveal his mother’s sexuality and Nicolson said that she believes Vita’s legacy is courage – to create a garden from scratch as a self-taught amateur, yes; but mostly to be oneself.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 