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.
20 Books of Summer, 3–4: Cheri & All Things Are Too Small
A cancer story that treads the line between biography and fiction, and a set of high-brow essays about popular culture and modern life.
Cheri by Jo Ann Beard (2023)
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
Claire Keegan helped popularize the trend of publishing stand-alone stories as small hardback volumes. It was my first time reading Beard, and her style does in fact remind me of Keegan, along with Denis Johnson and Ann Patchett. This originally appeared in the literary magazine Tin House in 2002. It is the life story of Cheri Tremble, a real woman who was born in 1950 and died in 1997 via an illegal assisted suicide conducted by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I’d heard a lot about Cheri, but his name was never mentioned – to avoid spoilers, of course, yet it’s key.
Cheri is an Amtrak ticket-taker who’s diagnosed with breast cancer in her mid-forties. After routine reconstructive surgery goes wrong and she’s left disabled, she returns to the Midwest and buys a home in Iowa. Here she’s supported by her best friends Linda and Wayne, and visited by her daughters Sarah and Katy. “Others have lived. She won’t be one of them. She feels it in her bones, quite literally.” When she hears the cancer has metastasized, she refuses treatment and starts making alternative plans. She’s philosophical about it; “Forty-six years is a long time if you look at it a certain way. Ursa is her seventh dog.”
Beard recounts all of this matter-of-factly (“the diminished lung capacity, the clangorous pain”), drawing on what is known of Cheri Tremble’s life and only adding her own stamp by making up memories that fuel flashbacks as Cheri drifts through pain-filled half-waking. One of these, of falling through the ice on a frozen pond as a child, appears early in the book and recurs at her moment of death. Beard also contrasts onlookers’ compassion or lack thereof.
It’s a potent portrait of everyday suffering and heroism and, in its way, an argument for assisted dying, which mustn’t be cloaked in secrecy as it was for Cheri – “They leave under cover of darkness, like duck hunters or criminals” to meet ‘Dr. Death’ in another state. I finished the story feeling underwhelmed; maybe I’ve simply read too much around the topic, but I couldn’t see how granting the subject interiority (which is what fiction is all about, yes, though the best biographies can do it, too) was enough to set it apart. (New purchase with birthday voucher, Hungerford Bookshop)
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld (2024)
Rothfeld, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book reviewer, is on hiatus from a philosophy PhD at Harvard. Her academic background is clear from her vocabulary. The more accessible essays tend to be ones that were previously published in periodicals. Although the topics range widely – decluttering, true crime, consent, binge eating, online stalking – she’s assembled them under a dichotomy of parsimony versus indulgence. And you know from the title that she errs on the side of the latter. Luxuriate in lust, wallow in words, stick two fingers up to minimalism and mindfulness and be your own messy self. You might boil the message down to: Love what you love, because that’s what makes you an individual. And happy individuals – well, ideally, in an equal society that gives everyone the same access to self-fulfillment and art – make for a thriving culture. That, with some Barthes and Kant quotes.
The writing has verve, from the alliterative word choice to the forcefulness of Rothfeld’s opinions. But in places her points of reference (from classic cinema, especially) are so obscure that I had no way in and the pieces felt like they would never end. My two favourites were “More Is More,” in which she’s as down on fragmentary autofiction (Jenny Offill et al.) as she is on Marie Kondo; and “Normal Novels,” about how she finds Sally Rooney’s self-deprecation and communism problematic. I knew the subject matter well enough to follow the arguments here, even if I ultimately disagreed with them.
The U.S. cover featuring a Bosch painting is so much better!
Rothfeld is worth reading as a cultural critic, at least in small doses. She is clearly not interested in being a personal essayist, however, as the intimacy she keeps discussing in theory is almost completely absent. A piece on mental health, “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” opens with one tantalizing autobiographical line – “My first year of college, I attempted suicide and was promptly hastened home by an ominously smiling administrator” – then proceeds to poke fun at meditation for most of its 40 pages. It was interesting to see her fan-girl over her favourite novel, which I would even try if it wasn’t 480 pages: “I want to be reading Mating [by Norman Rush] constantly; I want to have been reading Mating forever, but always for the first time; I want everything in my life to be Mating and nothing but Mating”. Keep an eye out for the sequel: Actually, Moderation Is Cool: How I Learned to Temper My Expectations.
With thanks to Virago Press for the free copy for review.
Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (Virago Anthology)
Books that dwell on family bonds often spotlight mothers and daughters, or fathers and sons; it seems a bit less common to examine the relationship with the parent of the opposite sex. In advance of Father’s Day, I picked up Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (1983; 1994) and read the first third. As I once did for Mother’s Day with another Virago anthology, Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, I’ll end up reading it across several years. Where that was a short fiction collection, though, this is all autobiographical pieces.
The section I’ve read so far contains seven essays counting editor Ursula Owen’s introduction, plus a retelling of the fairy tale “Cap o’ Rushes.” Most of the authors were born in the 1940s or 1950s, so a common element is having a father who served in the Second World War – or the First (for Angela Carter and Doris Lessing). There’s a sense, therefore, of momentous past experience that will never be disclosed. As Lessing writes of her father, “I knew him when his best years were over” – that is, after he had lost a leg, given up his favourite foods due to diabetes, and undertaken a doomed farming enterprise in colonial Africa.
Freudian interpretation seems like a given for several of the memoirists. Anne Boston was a posthumous child whose father was killed in the last days of WWII; in “Growing Up Fatherless,” she explores how this might have affected her.
I’ve always tended to discount the effects of being without a father – quite wrongly, I think now. There were effects, and they continued to influence my entire life, if anything increasingly so.
Among these effects, she enumerates a lack of proper “sexual conditioning.” Anthropologist Olivia Harris, too, wonders how a father determines a woman’s relationships with other men:
How far do women choose in their spouses, encourage in their sons, the ideal remembrance of the father? Am I, but not being married, refusing to exchange my father, or am I diffusing that chain of being?
Two authors specifically interrogate the alignment of the father with God. In “Heavenly Father,” Harris compares visions of fatherhood in various cultures, including in Anglican Christianity. Here the father, in parallel with the deity, is something of a distant moral arbiter. Sara Maitland felt the same about her father:
he really did correspond to the archetype of the Father. Many women grow out of their father when they discover that he is not really like what fathers are supposed, imaginatively, mythologically to be: he is weak, or a failure, or dishonest, or uninterested, or goes away. My father was not a perfect person, but he was very Father-like.
Unknown, aloof, a disciplinarian … I wonder if those descriptions resonate with you as much as they do with me?
In between pieces, Owen has reprinted 1–4 quotes from novels or academic sources that are relevant to fathers and daughters. The result is, as she acknowledges in the introduction, “a sort of collage.” She also remarks on the fact that it was difficult for more than one contributor to find a photo of herself with her father because “Dad always takes the photograph.” The essay I haven’t yet mentioned is a sweet but inconsequential two-pager by 13-year-old Kate Owen; it’s just occurred to me that that’s probably the editor’s daughter.
I’ll be interested to see how Michèle Roberts, Adrienne Rich, Alice Munro and more will clarify or complicate the picture of father–daughter relationships in the rest of the volume. (Secondhand from a National Trust bookshop)
#ReadingtheMeow2024 and 20 Books of Summer, 2: Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy
Reviews of books about cats have been a standard element on my blog over the years, and the second annual Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, was a good excuse to pick up some more. Tomorrow I’ll review two cat-themed novels; today I have a 2002 memoir that I have been meaning to read for ages.
I discovered Piercy through her poetry, then read Woman on the Edge of Time, a feminist classic that contrasts utopian and dystopian views of the future. Like May Sarton (whom Piercy knew), she devotes equal energy to both fiction and poetry and is an inveterate cat lady. Piercy is still publishing and blogging at 88; I have much to catch up on from her back catalogue. A précis of her life is almost stranger than fiction: she grew up in poverty in Detroit, joining a teen gang and discovering her sexuality first with other girls (“The first time I had an orgasm—I was eleven—I was astonished and also I had a feeling of recognition. Of course, that’s it. As if that was what I had been expecting or looking for”) then with men; had a couple abortions, including one self-administered, then got sterilized; honed her writing craft at college; married three times – briefly to a Frenchman, an unhappy open arrangement, and now for 40+ years to fellow writer Ira Wood; and wrote like a dervish yet has remained on the periphery of the literary establishment and thus struggled financially.
Political activism has been a constant for Piercy, whether protesting the Vietnam War or supporting women’s reproductive rights. She and Wood also nurtured a progressive Jewish community around their Cape Cod home. Again like Sarton, she has always embraced the term feminist but been more resistant to queerness. A generational thing, perhaps; nowadays we would surely call Piercy bisexual or at least sexually fluid, but she’s more apt to dismiss her teen girlfriends and her later affairs with women as a phase. The personal life and career mesh here, though there is more of a focus on the former, such that I haven’t really gotten a clear idea of which of her novels I might want to try. Each chapter ends with one of her poems (wordy, autobiographical free verse), giving a flavour of her work in other genres. She portrays herself as a nomad who wandered various cities before settling into an unexpectedly homely and seasonal existence: “I am a stray cat who has finally found a good home.”
I admired Piercy’s self-knowledge here: her determination to write (including to keep her late mother alive in her) and to preserve the solitude necessary to her work –
I know I am an intense, rather angular passionate woman, not easy to like, not easy to live with, even for myself. Convictions, causes jostle in me. My appetites are large. I have learned to protect my work time and my privacy fiercely. I have been a better writer than a person, and again and again I made that choice. Writing is my core. I do not regret the security I have sacrificed to serve it.
and her conviction that motherhood was not for her –
I did not want children. I never felt I would be less of a woman, but I feared I would be less of a writer if I reproduced. I didn’t feel anything special about my genetic composition warranted replicating it. … I liked many of my friends’ children as they grew older: I was a good aunt. But I never desired to possess them or have one of my own. … I have never regretted staying childless. My privacy, my time for work … are precious. I feel my life is full enough.
“There were no role models for a woman like me,” she felt at the end of college, but she can in her turn be a role model of the female artist’s life, socially engaged and willing to take risks.
As to the title: There is, of course, special delight here for cat lovers. Piercy has had cats since she was a child, and in the Cape Cod era has usually kept a band of five or so. In the interludes we meet some true characters: Arofa the Siamese, Cho-Cho who lived to 21, mother and son Dinah and Oboe, alpha male Jim Beam, and many more. Of course, they age and fall ill and there are some goodbye scenes. She mostly describes these unsentimentally – if you’ve read Doris Lessing on cats, I’d say the attitude is similar. There are extremes of both love and despair: she licks a kitten to bond with her; she euthanizes one beloved cat herself. She wrote this memoir at 65 and felt that her cats were teaching her how to age.
There is a sadness to living with old cats; also a comfort and pleasure, for you know each other thoroughly and the trust is almost absolute. … The knowledge of how much I will miss them is always with me, but so is the sense of my own time flowing out, my life passing and the necessity to value it as I value them. Old cats are precious.
Even those unfamiliar with Piercy’s work might enjoy reading a perspective on the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. This was right up my street because of her love of cats, her defence of the childfree life, and her interest in identity and memory. Because she doesn’t talk in depth about her oeuvre, you needn’t have read anything else of hers to appreciate reading this. I hope you have a cat who will nap on your lap as you do so. (Secondhand, a gift from my wish list) 
Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” & Why I Acquired My First Smartphone at Age 40.5
Wendell Berry is an American treasure: the 89-year-old Kentucky farmer is also a philosopher, poet, theologian, and writer of fiction, and many of his pronouncements bear the timeless wisdom of a biblical prophet. I’ve read his work from several genres and was curious to see how this 1987 essay – originally published in Harper’s Magazine and reprinted, along with some letters to the editor in response, plus extra commentary in the form of a 1990 essay, by Penguin in 2018 as the 50th and final entry in their Penguin Modern pamphlet series – might resonate with my own reluctance to adopt current technology.
The title essay is brief, barely filling 4.5 pages of a small-format paperback. It’s so concise that it would be difficult to summarize in many fewer words, but I’ll run through the points he makes across the initial essay, the replies to the correspondence, and a follow-up piece entitled “Feminism, the Body and the Machine” (1989). Berry laments his reliance on energy corporations and wants to limit that as much as possible. He decries consumerism in general; he isn’t going to acquire something just to be ‘keeping up with the times’. He doesn’t believe a computer will make his work better, and it doesn’t meet his criteria for a useful tool (smaller, cheaper and less energy-intensive than what it replaces; sourced locally and easily repaired by a non-specialist). He is perfectly happy with his current arrangement: he writes his work by hand and his wife types it up for him. He is loath to lose this human touch.
The letters to the editor, predictably, accuse him of self-righteousness for depicting his choice as the more virtuous one. The correspondents also felt they had to stand up for Berry’s wife, who might have better things to do than act as her husband’s secretary. This is the only time the author becomes slightly defensive, basically saying, ‘you don’t know anything about me, my wife or my marriage … maybe she wants to!’ He doubles down on the environmental harm caused by technology and consumerism, acknowledging his continued dependence on fossil fuels and vowing to avoid them, and unnecessary purchases, where possible.
If some technology does damage to the world, … then why is it not reasonable, and indeed moral, to try to limit one’s use of that technology?
To the extent that we consume, in our present circumstances, we are guilty. To the extent that we guilty consumers are conservationists, we are absurd. … can we do something directly to solve our share of the problem? … Why then is not my first duty to reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption?
If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer one is not to use one.
He even appears to speak prophetically to the rise of artificial intelligence:
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. … And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. The danger most immediately to be feared in ‘technological progress’ is the degradation and obsolescence of the body.
Certain of his arguments felt relevant to me as I ponder my own relationship to technology. I compose all my reviews on a 19-year-old personal computer that’s not connected to the Internet. I don’t listen to the radio and have seen maybe three films in the past two years. We’ve been television-free for a decade and I have never regretted it (Berry: “It is easy – it is even a luxury – to deny oneself the use of a television set, and I zealously practice that form of self-denial. Every time I see television (at other people’s houses), I am more inclined to congratulate myself on my deprivation.”).
I find it so hard to adjust to new tech that my reluctance may have shaded into suspicion. I’m certainly no early adopter, but I’d also object to the label “Luddite”: since 2013 I’ve been using e-readers, which are invaluable in my reviewing work. But for 15 years or more I have been looking at other people and their smartphones with disdain. I prided myself on my resistance. Stubbornness seemed like a virtue when the alternative was spending a lot of money on something I didn’t need.
Receiving my first cell phone in July 2004 (with my dad at left; at Dulles airport).
Two months ago, though, I finally gave in and accepted a hand-me-down Motorola Android phone from my father-in-law, after nearly 20 years of using an old-style mobile phone. As we were renegotiating our phone and Internet contract, I got virtually unlimited minutes and data on this device for £6/month, with no initial outlay. Had I been forced to make a purchase, I think I would still be holding out. But I had gotten to the point where refusal was cutting off my nose to spite my face. Why keep martyring myself – saying I couldn’t make important household phone calls because they drained my pay-as-you-go credit; learning complex workarounds to post to Instagram from my PC; taking crap photos on a digital camera held together with a rubber band? Why resist utility just for the sake of it?
To be clear, this was not a matter of saving time. I’m not a busy person. Plus I believe there is value in slowing down and acting deliberately. (See this book-based article I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018 on the benefits of “wasting time.”) Mindless scrolling is as much a temptation on a PC as on a phone, so avoiding social media was not a motive for me; others with addictive tendencies may decide otherwise. Nor did I view convenience as reason enough per se. However, I admit I was attracted to the efficiency of a pocket-sized device that can at once replace a computer, pager, telephone, Rolodex, phonebook, camera, photo album, television screen, music player, camcorder, Dictaphone, stopwatch, calculator, map, satnav, flashlight, encyclopaedia, Kindle library, calendar, diary, Post-It notes, notebook, alarm clock and mirror. (Have I missed anything?) Talk about multi-tasking!
Out with the old, in with the new?
I would still say that I object to tech serving as a status symbol or a basis for self-importance, and I’d be pretty dubious about it ever being a worthwhile hobby. Should this phone fail me in future, I’ll copy my husband’s habit of buying a secondhand handset for £60–80. I wouldn’t acquire something that represented new extraction of rare resources. Treating things (or people) as disposable is anathema to me, something about which I know Berry would agree. I’m naturally parsimonious, obsessive about keeping things going for as long as possible and recycling them responsibly when they reach their end of life.
It’s one reason why I’ve gotten involved in the Repair Café movement. I volunteer for our local branch, which started up in February, on the admin and publicity side of things. The old-fashioned, make-do-and-mend ethos appeals to me. It’s the same spirit evoked in the lyrics of American singer-songwriter Mark Erelli’s “Analog Hero”:
He’s the fix-it man, the fix-it man
If he can’t put it back together, then it was never worth a damn
Maybe he’s crazy for trying to save what’s already gone
Now it ain’t even broken and we’re going for the upgrade
Nobody thinks twice ’bout what we’re really throwing away
It’s out with the old, in with the new…
I can imagine Wendell Berry still pecking out his words on a typewriter on his Kentucky farm. He’s an analogue hero, too. And he doesn’t go nearly as far as Mark Boyle, whose radical life experiment is recounted in The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books in 2019.
I have pretty much made my peace with owning a smartphone. I have few apps and am still more likely to work at my PC or on paper. I’ll concede that I enjoy being able to post to X or Instagram wherever I am, and to keep up with messages on the go. (I used to have to say cryptic things to friends like, “once I leave the house, I will be unavailable except by text.”) Mostly, I’m relieved to have shed the frustrations of outmoded tech. Though I still keep my Nokia brick by my bedside as a trusty alarm clock – and a torch for when the cat wakes me between 2 and 5 each morning.
Ultimately, I feel, a smartphone is a tool like any other. It’s how you use it. Salman Rushdie comes to much the same conclusion about the would-be murder weapon wielded against him: “a knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral” (from Knife).
Berry’s argument about overreliance on energy remains a good one, but we are all so complicit in so many ways – even more so than in the late 1980s when he was writing – that avoiding the computer, and now the smartphone, doesn’t seem to hold particular merit. While this pamphlet will be but a quaint curio piece for most readers (rather than a parallel to the battle of wills I’ve conducted with myself), it is engaging and convincing, and the societal issues it considers are still ones to be wrestled with.
My copy was purchased with part of a £30 voucher I received free from Penguin UK for being part of their “Bookmarks” online community – answering polls, surveys, etc.
Nine Days in France and What I Read
Who would have predicted that the South of France would be colder and rainier than the England we left behind? Nonetheless, we had a pleasant, low-key week at the Limousin–Dordogne border. We stayed in a gîte at Le Moulin de Pensol, a complex run by an English couple who keep horses, donkeys and chickens but are otherwise rewilding their land (similar to the Wild Finca project we visited in Spain two years ago). Their site is known for butterflies, including multiple almost indistinguishable fritillary species, so there was plenty of insect and bird watching for my husband in brief bursts of sunshine between showers. When it was too wet to go out, we played board games, drank wine and read books.
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- Our gite. Photos by Chris Foster.
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- The chickens wanted in!
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- Wandering the meadows
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- Butterfly watching
However, we did manage a few short outings: the Trou de Philippou gorge; a peek at a Saturday morning repair café (I’m a volunteer doing admin and publicity for our local repair café, which started in February) and its “recyclerie” charity shop in a nearby village; and St-Jean-de-Côle, “one of the loveliest villages in the Dordogne” according to the Rough Guide. We were taken by the main square’s church, castle and screaming swift parties – so much bigger than back home – which we’d likewise watched circling the château in the attractive medieval town of Saumur on the Loire, where we stopped for a night on the way down. There were also fresh cheeses and produce, including the most delicious strawberries ever (the “Charlotte” variety), from the two closest markets. Piégut’s is the largest market in southwest France but we had to use our imaginations as the downpour kept plenty of sellers away.
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- St-Jean-de-Cole’s main square
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- Photo by Chris Foster.
The highlight of the trip was a visit to Grotte de Villars, a cave network with spectacular stalactites and stalagmites. Less well known than Lascaux, which is now inaccessible to visitors except via a reproduction, it too has prehistoric cave paintings of horses and bison, and 20,000-year-old bear claw marks. The paintings are gradually disappearing behind the constant calcite-creating drips; I pondered whether they will vanish before the human race does. We were lucky to find it so quiet that we got a private English-language tour. Proprietors were also so kind as to speak English to us when we shopped at a nano-brewery and did a tasting at a cider and calvados producer in Normandy on our way back to the ferry. Otherwise, we muddled through with the bare minimum of French at shops and eateries.
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- Abbaye de Nouaillé-Maupertuis (lunch stop en route)
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- (Photo at left by Chris Foster.)
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- Saumur castle
My other highlight was finding two Little Free Libraries, a walk-in one that we happened to pass in Saint-Martin-l’Ars on our initial drive down south and another in Abjat-sur-Bandiat. I felt slightly bad about taking a book at the first because of its insistence on returning or replacing once you’d read it, so I made up for it by donating Cold Spring Harbor to the book exchange box in Abjat when we returned to its crêperie for our one meal out of the holiday.
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- Le Pese Lettres, Saint-Martin-l’Ars
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- Stricter than the usual LFL policy
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- Several English-language shelves
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- My chosen book
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- Abjat-sur-Bandiat book exchange box
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- Cute cat mural in Abjat
What I Read
Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue (2000): A slammerkin was, in eighteenth-century parlance, a loose gown or a loose woman. Donoghue was inspired by the bare facts about Mary Saunders, a historical figure. In her imagining, Mary is thrown out by her family at age 14 and falls into prostitution in London. Within a couple of years, she decides to reform her life by becoming a dressmaker’s assistant in her mother’s hometown of Monmouth, but her past won’t let her go. The close third person narration shifts to depict the constrained lives of the other women in the household: the mistress, Mrs Jones, who has lost multiple children and pregnancies; governess Mrs Ash, whose initial position as a wet nurse was her salvation after her husband left her; and Abi, an enslaved Black woman. This was gripping throughout, like a cross between Alias Grace and The Crimson Petal and the White. The only thing that had me on the back foot was that, it being Donoghue, I expected lesbianism. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer (1998): Only my second novel from Dyer, an annoyingly talented author who writes whatever he wants, in any genre, inimitably. This reminded me of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi for its hedonistic travels. Luke and Alex, twentysomething Englishmen, meet as factory workers in Paris and quickly become best mates. With their girlfriends, Nicole and Sahra, they form what seems an unbreakable quartet. The couples carouse, dance in nightclubs high on ecstasy, and have a lot of sex. A bit more memorable are their forays outside the city for Christmas and the summer. The first-person plural perspective resolves into a narrator who must have fantasized the other couple’s explicit sex scenes; occasional flash-forwards reveal that only one pair is destined to last. This is nostalgic for the heady days of youth in the same way as Sweetbitter. I was intrigued to learn that random lines were sampled from Fiesta; though it is lad lit, I wouldn’t have expected a Hemingway homage from the style. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
Sanctuary in the South: The Cats of Mas des Chats by Margaret Reinhold (1993): Reinhold (still alive at 96?!) is a South African psychotherapist who relocated from London to Provence, taking her two cats with her and eventually adopting another eight, many of whom had been neglected by owners in the vicinity. This sweet and meandering book of vignettes about her pets’ interactions and hierarchy is generally light in tone, but with the requisite sadness you get from reading about animals ageing, falling ill or meeting with accidents, and (in two cases) being buried on the property. “Les chats sont difficiles,” as a local shop owner observes to her. But would we cat lovers have it any other way? Reinhold often imagines what her cats would say to her. Like Doreen Tovey, whose books this closely resembles, she is as fascinated by human foibles as by feline antics. One extended sequence concerns her doomed attempts to hire a live-in caretaker for the cats. She never learned her lesson about putting a proper contract in place; several chancers tried the role and took advantage of her kindness. (Secondhand purchase – Community Furniture Project)
Why Willows Weep: Contemporary Tales from the Woods, ed. Tracy Chevalier and Simon Prosser (2011): These 19 short fictions, rather like Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories, imagine how certain tree species developed their particular characteristics. I wasn’t expecting the fable setup and probably would have preferred a miscellany of essays and various fictional approaches. However, there is a run of great stories in the middle: from Susan Elderkin on “How the Blackthorn Got Its Flowers” to Terence Blacker on “Why Elms Die Young.” The stand-outs for me were by Rachel Billington and Maria McCann. It was a cute touch to have each author’s mini-bio end with their favourite tree, except, um, bamboo isn’t one (it’s a giant grass). I’ll probably keep this for the randomness of where I found it and the Leanne Shapton illustrations. (Secondhand purchase – La Monnerie recyclerie) 
And the first two-thirds of Daughters of the House by Michèle Roberts (1993): Thérèse and Léonie are cousins: the one French and the other English but making visits to her relatives in Normandy every summer. In the slightly forbidding family home, the adolescent girls learn about life, loss and sex. Each short chapter is named after a different object in the house. That Thérèse seems slightly otherworldly can be attributed to her inspiration, which Roberts reveals in a prefatory note: Saint Thérèse, aka The Little Flower. Roberts reminds me of A.S. Byatt and Shena Mackay; her work is slightly austere and can be slow going, but her ideas always draw me in. (Secondhand – Newbury charity shop)
A DNF: Claudine at School by Colette (a free download), which was dull and in way too small a print on my e-reader.
Plus portions of: various e-books for paid reviews, two May review books, and several library books including Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson and The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.
I’m happy to be home with my cat and canal, the two things I miss most when we’re away.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 