Review Catch-Up: Memoirs by Maggie Nelson and Jonathan Tepper
Two memoirs that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now: a novella-length response to chronic pain, and a story of growing up at a refuge for addicts and AIDS victims in Spain.
Pathemata: Or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson (2025)
This is a very short (68-page), dreamy meditation on pain. Nelson has ongoing chronic jaw pain despite multiple expensive trips to specialist clinics and many different treatment strategies tried. As she writes, it’s the pandemic era and she’s also home-schooling her son. Meanwhile, her marriage to H seems to be crumbling. The text is composed of non-indented sentences in roughly thematic groupings. But dreams are recounted as often as real-life events, making this a particularly slippery work of autofiction, with an emphasis on the fiction.
The dentist in the valley and I go back and forth over injecting my jaw with Botox.
I hold out, realising that the only thing that frightens me more than pain and its viciousness is numbness, paralysis.
Sometimes I wonder what I would have thought about all these years, if I hadn’t spent so much time thinking about the pain.
Nelson dwells on the irony of someone who talks for a living having so much trouble with oral speech. She also reflects on the early loss of her father and the recent death of a close friend, C. Could it be that jaw pain is how her body is manifesting long-held grief and stress? she wonders.
The Argonauts is an absolute classic of life writing and I’ve long admired Nelson’s cultural criticism. She’s an important thinker on queerness and embodiment, in the vein of Garth Greenwell and Olivia Laing. Aside from the indulgence of including all the dreams (and one instance of jargon: “It sounds like an invagination – a chamber to hold the pastiche of lacerations”), there’s nothing wrong with this per se. It’s just that the essay is over before it’s begun. Why not part of a longer essay collection, or expanded into a full-length memoir?
With thanks to Fern Press, Vintage (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction by Jonathan Tepper (2026)
In the early 1980s, the author and his three brothers moved to Spain with their missionary parents, Elliott and Mary, who founded Betel, a rehabilitation centre for junkies (yonkis). “Our neighbourhood [San Blas in Madrid] was the biggest drug supermarket not only in Spain but in all of Europe, and it was happening right on our doorstep.” Betel is still operating today and has supported 100,000 addicts, but it all started with eight young men in the Teppers’ living room. Elliott was filled with righteous enthusiasm for the task and always had scripture passages and C.S. Lewis quotes on the tip of his tongue. When his four sons went delivering leaflets to heroin addicts on the street, they stood out for their blond hair and blue eyes. Soon, though, the yonkis they helped became more than ‘customers’, or objects of pity, but friends as close as family.
From a child’s perspective, the memoir effectively recreates scenes and dialogue from these outreach years. I especially appreciated the descriptions of what it’s like to grow up inside a religious bubble: “the invisible walls of my family and beliefs had been my world. In the [goldfish] bowl you think the water is all there is”. I’m a minister’s kid myself, so I nodded along to lines like “Being a preacher’s kid meant being the first to church and last to leave as my parents hugged and spoke to everybody.” There was real grief as, one by one, young men they knew fell victim to AIDS: Luis, Ángel, Raúl, Salva, Jambri. But there were other losses, too: Tepper’s younger brother, Timothy, died in a car accident while they were back in the USA on a sabbatical in 1991, and his mother later died by suicide after being disabled by a brain tumour.
There’s a section of black-and-white photographs at the end of the book, and the chapters are headed with Spanish phrases to evoke the setting. Later chapters follow Tepper through his college years and the triumph of getting a Rhodes scholarship. (In fact, he and his two remaining brothers all graduated from Oxford University on the same day.) The focus on academic success as a more legitimate high than that offered by drugs reminded me of Educated by Tara Westover, while the solemn duty of being an eyewitness to the AIDS crisis is reminiscent of All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks. This is a touching tribute to all those dead.
With thanks to the author and Constable (Little, Brown) for the advanced proof copy for review.
Reading Ireland Month, Part II: Dowd, Enright, Madden & Nugent
I’m catching up with a final set of reviews for #ReadingIrelandMonth26. I read two novels set at least partially during the Troubles, one of them for teenagers; a quiet novel about adultery and bereavement; and a thriller about consent and family legacy. I also read the first half of one more novel, a sombre one about the aftermath of a mental health crisis. Between this post and my first one, I covered 6.5 novels by Irish women, which I’ll call a win.
Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd (2008)
Fergus McCann is 18 and taking A levels; if he can only get three Bs, he’ll have his ticket out of Northern Ireland to study medicine at Aberdeen. This is no ordinary summer, though. He loves running on the hills at the border and here he makes a landmark discovery and embarks on a risky mission. The plot opens with Fergus and his uncle stumbling on the corpse of a girl while cutting peats. It’s a case for archaeologists rather than the police: the body is from the Iron Age and there’s evidence that the girl was sacrificed. An acquaintance then pressures Fergus into running parcels up and down the hill, right under the noses of the British at the checkpoint. He makes friends with Owain, a Welsh soldier, but gets a horrible feeling he’s partially responsible for the bombings he soon hears about on the radio. His family is enmeshed in the IRA anyway: his brother is among the hunger strikers in the local prison. There’s every chance that Joey could die before the summer is out, as much a victim of injustice as “Mel” (as Fergus names the girl from the bog, whose story he dreams).
This was Dowd’s third novel, published posthumously after her death from cancer, and won the Carnegie Medal. I’d say it’s one of the few best young adult novels I’ve ever read. (It’s shelved under Teenage Fiction at my library.) It’s an excellent peripheral glance at history ancient and modern – Fergus’s letter to Margaret Thatcher is brilliant – and effectively recreates a teen’s divided attention: friends, schooling, family drama, the future, and romance (via the daughter of the archaeologist). I searched my library catalogue for further books on bog bodies after reading Anna North’s Bog Queen and it really paid off! (Public library)
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (2011)
I’ve only read a handful of Enright novels and wanted to experience more, so picked this one because it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. On the face of it, it’s a fairly straightforward adultery story, but the unshowy potency of Enright’s writing and her realistic insight into relationships set it apart. While married to Conor, Gina has an affair with Seán, who’s older and married to Aileen. Seán is part of their social circle but also someone she knows through work, and business trips are an easy excuse. “The office game was another game for us to play, after the suburban couples game, and before the game of hotel assignations and fabulous, illicit lust, and neither of us thought there might come a moment when all the games would stop. It was a lot of fun.” Gina narrates matter-of-factly, rejecting cause-and-effect language. She doesn’t defend herself, or fool herself that Seán is perfect. This new relationship involves as many challenges as her marriage, what with her mother’s death and Seán’s preteen daughter, Evie, who appears to be autistic and epileptic. The short chapters are all headed with song lyrics, mostly from love songs (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Stop! In the Name of Love”) whose ironic optimism underlines the novel’s gently melancholy tone. This reminded me most of Maggie O’Farrell’s early work, and more than justified delving into Enright’s back catalogue. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
{SPOILERS IN THE REST!!}
One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden (1996)
Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses was our book club selection for March; I’d read it just two years ago, so skimmed back through and was impressed by its construction. Some were less convinced by the framing story and not emotionally engaged with Michael and Cushla’s affair, but we all appreciated it as a sideways look at Northern Irish history. One by One in the Darkness, which was also shortlisted for the Women’s (then Orange) Prize, is set close to its publication in the 1990s but returns to the Troubles through memories and flashbacks. Set over one week – Saturday to Friday – it’s the story of the three Quinn sisters. Cate is a journalist in London who flies home to Antrim to break the news that she’s pregnant out of wedlock. Helen is a lawyer and Sally a schoolteacher. They, their mother, and Uncle Brian have all gotten on with life as best they could, but their father’s murder is something they can’t forget and won’t ever get over. By saving that scene for the very last page of this novella, Madden keeps the horror of it fresh. Through one family’s story, she gives a sense of the scope of the country’s loss. But the book is not without a dark sense of humour, either. Madden was a new author for me. I found her work profound at the sentence level (see below for some favourite lines) rather than engaging at the plot level. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
“‘What’s wrong with Uncle Peter?’ ‘Two things,’ [Granny] said. ‘He thinks too much, and then he drinks too much.’”
“Once when [Cate] was home she’d remarked to Helen that she thought the forecasts were often inaccurate in Northern Ireland. ‘It’s probably deliberate,’ Helen had replied. ‘If they read out the average day’s news here and then said at the end of it, “Oh, and by the way, it’s going to bucket rain for the next twenty-four hours,” it might be more than people could take.’”
“Cate had remarked once that it was only when you lived away from Northern Ireland that you realised on returning how deeply divided a society it was, and how strange the effect of that could be.”
“There’d been well over three thousand people killed since the start of the Troubles, and every single one of them had parents or husbands and wives and children whose lives had been wrecked. It would be written about in the paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if that was the end, when it was really only the beginning.”
The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent (2026)
We read Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond for book club a couple years ago and it was a great Northumberland holiday read for me, with a deliciously off-kilter narrator whose traumatized (and perhaps neurodivergent) perspective carried the novel. Here again Nugent prioritizes unreliable women’s voices and dark happenings, but Ruby is awfully hard to like. At age 16, she falsely accuses her older sister Erin’s boyfriend Milo of raping her. Milo maintains his innocence all along, but goes to jail for the crime; after all, DNA evidence can’t lie, right? Years of his life – and a heartbroken Erin’s – are stolen, his mother dies by suicide, Ruby becomes dependent on alcohol: all of this because of sisterly jealousy and an elaborate lie that their mother upholds rather than expose the family to further shame.
Narration alternates between Erin in Boston and Ruby, who’s moved back to Ireland with their mother. For Ruby’s confession to work, readers are kept in the dark about the truth of the incident, though only for 76 pages. Together the sisters give a tedious blow-by-blow of the intervening years – until Ruby’s daughter, Lucy, is raped by her boss on a drunken night out. Ruby refuses to believe her “because if it was true, that was karma coming to bit me on the ass.” This is where things finally get interesting, as Nugent explores ironies and familial patterns. But I’m sure I won’t be the only one to find the whole thing distasteful. Nugent clearly anticipates a backlash, stating in a prefatory letter, “I need to be very clear about the fact that girls and women like Ruby Cooper are extremely rare.” Was it worth undermining the #BelieveWomen campaign to explore a certain state of mind? Nah.
With thanks to Sandycove (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
I’d also hoped to finish one more, but ran out of time. Here are my thoughts on the first half:
Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson (2025)
Rachel knew Tom had recurring problems with depression, but had no idea he was on the verge of a breakdown when he deliberately drove their car off the road with the intention of killing his entire family. Their two young children die in the crash but they both survive – Tom held in a psychiatric hospital and Rachel resuming her life as a nurse. The chapters alternate between “After” and “Before,” giving relative date markers in weeks, months or years out from the incident. Gleeson’s understated prose makes it possible for readers to face a tragedy so awful we’d otherwise look away; it never tips over into mawkishness.
March Releases by Emily Haworth-Booth, Roz Morris, Catherine Redford & Joann Sfar
Autofiction about beloved animals and ambivalence over motherhood, a witty memoir of house-hunting in the South of England, a poetry collection reflecting on bereavement and queer parenthood, and a graphic novel adaptation of a 20th-century classic: I had a real variety this month.
Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth
Is the entire novel built around a pun? The French for mother, mère, is a homophone for mare. Like Motherhood by Sheila Heti, this is a work of autofiction that circles the question of becoming a mother and posits the writing life and other relationships as partial substitutes for parenthood. But yes, there is also a literal horse. The narrator lives in London with her husband and scrapes together a living by teaching creative writing on Zoom and writing children’s books. They’ve recently lost their dearly loved dog and are friendly with the neighbours whose garden they share and whose noise they hear the other side of a wall – so much so that she thinks of the two girls as “not-my-daughter” and “also-not-my-daughter.” The narrator is contracted to write a book about plastics for children but can’t seem to land on the right tone somewhere between alarm and false cheer. Approaching age 40, she’s finally coming to terms with the fact that she won’t be a mother due to premature ovarian failure.
Into all this comes the love of a horse. She finds a stable two miles away and spends three days a week there riding and tending to a black and white mare. As a child she’d been horse-crazy, so this isn’t “a new feeling … but a resurgence. Deeply familiar. Lust and tenderness and hope mingled.” Time with the horse reminds her to be present, to live in her body despite its flaws, to take joy in the everyday. “Being with the horse has come to feel more and more like an exercise in metaphor.”
Haworth-Booth makes caring for an animal analogous with motherhood, but doesn’t stop at easy symbolism. The mare might stand in for female fear and vulnerability, but is also flesh and blood. Cultivating bodily bonds with other creatures is part of how we find purpose when life is threatened by chronic illness and climate breakdown.
This is Haworth-Booth’s adult debut and I hope it will be submitted for next year’s McKitterick Prize. Its wry honesty appealed to me, as did the narrator’s interactions with her mother (who forwards her “Childfree and fabulous” e-newsletters) and not-my-daughter, who share her interest in horses. There’s also the meta angle of the narrator assembling an “H folder” that eventually becomes this book. Hard to tell in my Kindle file, but some passages seem to be aligned like poetry. “The boundaries are blurring … this is the age of the non-binary, the hybrid, … the uncategorisable,” the narrator says to her students. “What about a collection of thoughts themed around a subject, themed around, for example, a horse?” I can see how some would find this insufferable, but it really worked for me. (Read via NetGalley)
Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Memoir of Househunting, Happenstance and Home by Roz Morris
Now that we’re four years on from the purchase of our first property, I can read about house-hunting without finding it too depressing! When Morris and her husband Dave decided to move out of London, securing a buyer for their house was a cinch, but finding a new place that they loved as much as their home of twenty-plus years seemed like an insurmountable challenge. She wrings much humour from the process by comparing house viewings with first dates – as in a romcom, you’re always looking out for “The One,” but all the potential suitors have various issues – and employing jokey nicknames (“the Rusty Tractor house,” “The Aardvark House”), and a financial shorthand of arms and legs.
Estate agents, potential buyers, and sellers alike are maddening in their quirks. There are so many inexplicable features in otherwise normal suburban Surrey properties: more toilets than bedrooms, giant air-conditioning units, a long bench that looks like it belongs in a bus station waiting room, and so on. In between details of the search, Morris remembers her upbringing in mining country made famous by Alan Garner and how she and Dave met and made a life together as childfree writers. This is a warm and funny read whose short chapters fly by, but it also made me ponder what is essential in a home. Though I was mildly taken aback by the ending, I came to think of it as fitting, in a T.S. Eliot knowing the place for the first time sort of way.
With thanks to the author for the free e-copy for review. (Published by Spark Furnace.)
The Way the Water Held Me by Catherine Redford
This isn’t your average bereavement story: Redford was only 35 and had a young child at the time that her wife died of cancer. We don’t hear so much about being widowed early, or in a same-sex partnership. Redford interrogates the expectations of widowhood (“If not Victoria, I can be Jackie O”) through biographical poems about Mary Shelley’s writings in the wake of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s untimely death. There’s a found/collage poem pieced together from one of Shelley’s letters; others quote from her Frankenstein and The Last Man. Elsewhere, Redford alludes to Woolf, Wordsworth and Wuthering Heights. Redford recalls feeling bombarded by people’s sympathy (“The flowers arrive like a tsunami”) and having no idea how to respond when asked how she’s doing. She relives moments from their carefree courtship days, lists the elements of “Her Last Day,” and documents the rituals that enshrine memory. I loved the archival vocabulary of “Obituary” (below) and how belongings left behind take on outsize significance: “I cross-examine every page of her notebooks, lay out the contents / of each drawer in a crescent on the floor as if they are grave goods // selected for her journey to the afterlife” (from “Circles”). The alliteration and nature (especially seaside) imagery were just right for me. From the hardest of circumstances came something tender and lovely.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)
Graphic novel adaptation by Joann Sfar (2008); colours by Brigitte Findakly
[Translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone, 2010]
Reading The Little Prince in the original French was a long-term project in my high school French curriculum. I can still remember snippets such as “Dessine-moi un mouton” (“Draw me a sheep”) and apprivoiser (to tame) – it was good for learning such random vocabulary words. You are probably familiar with this fable of a pilot who crashes in the desert and meets a strange, possibly alien boy and talks with him about his interplanetary journeys as well as a flower, a snake, a fox, and so on. Before he landed on earth, he alighted on six other planets where he met a king, a vain man, a drunk, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer, all of whom appeared to be trapped in destructive patterns of their own making.
I had a few issues. The main one is that, these days, the story falls for me in the same category as other intolerably twee stuff like Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Granted, “You can only see clearly with the heart. What matters is invisible to the eye” is profound in its simplicity. But much of the rest had me rolling my eyes. As for the adaptation, why was it deemed necessary? The original The Little Prince is illustrated. Plus the drawing style is rather grotesque. (I don’t remember this from the only other book I’ve read by Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat.) I guess the idea was to contrast the boy’s innocence and blue-pool eyes with the essential ugliness of much of what he encounters. But what’s with most of the planets’ residents having noses like penises? (Unsolicited review copy from SelfMadeHero)
Three for #ReadingWales26: Tishani Doshi, Gwyneth Lewis & Jan Morris
As well as Reading Ireland Month, it’s Reading Wales Month, hosted by Karen of BookerTalk and Kath of Nut Press. I read three relevant books by women – my ideal trio of a novel, a poetry collection and a memoir – and also experienced some additional poetry via a special church service.
Fountainville by Tishani Doshi (2013)
This is part of a Seren series retelling the medieval Welsh legends in the Mabinogion. Doshi has Welsh and Indian parentage; here she blends her knowledge of both countries and their stories. Luna, the narrator, works as an assistant to Begum, the Lady of the Fountain. Begum and her husband Kedar, a gangster, operate a shady surrogacy clinic. Then Owain Knight comes to town and makes Luna a proposition and things get complicated. Though this is novella length, it took me ages to slog through it. My lack of familiarity with the source text felt like a problem – I’d rather it had been summarized in a foreword rather than an afterword – and Doshi’s narrative is insipid despite the soap opera-ready content; I saw none of the spark and originality I’ve found in her excellent poetry. On this evidence I’m unlikely to pick up any more of her fiction. In any case, it was appropriate that I bought an ex-Swansea Libraries copy from Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. (Secondhand purchase)
First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis (2025)
I’ve read a couple of Lewis’s poetry collections before (e.g. Parables and Faxes), as well as her memoir of depression and her travel book about sailing with her husband. She was Wales’s first poet laureate in 2005–6 and this is her sixth collection in English. The first section about her childhood with an emotionally abusive mother envisions her mother as a spider. The rest of the book traces the effects of that early trauma into chronic illness and mental health struggles. There is a sense of lost time. “Late Blackberries” opens “Where was I during the glut? I missed / the first sweetness, alluring and glossy // black as a dormouse’s eye, when pickings / were easy. A decade lost being ill tastes // bitter.” The imagery is drawn from physics, the countryside, medieval religious art, and the discovery of mummies. The two most quintessentially Welsh poems are “Red Waistcoat,” about coming across a dead ewe in a field, and “Under,” commemorating a fatal 2011 mining accident. Forasmuch as the book’s themes seemed perfectly assembled to appeal to me, I never felt they’d been brought to life in the language. (Secondhand purchase – Exeter charity shop)
A Writer’s House in Wales by Jan Morris (2002)
“My house is so absolutely of its setting, is rooted so profoundly not just in the soil, but in the very idea of Wales, that anywhere else it would lose all charisma.”
Although Jan Morris was famous for travelling the world and writing all about it, she equally loved being able to retreat to Trefan Morys, “for me … a summation, a metaphor, a paradigm, a microcosm, an examplar, a multum in parvo, a demonstration, a solidification, an essence, a regular epitome of all that I love about my country.” That excerpt from the first paragraph is a typical example of her effusive overwriting. This short book was clearly written for people (Americans) who know nothing about Wales, not even where on earth it is. I love her cosy evocation of her home – actually the renovated 18th-century stable block of the former family home, ample for her and Elizabeth in their dotage – and its bookshelves and animal life, whether domestic (Ibsen the Norwegian forest cat) or wild (bats in the attic!).
However, this was a reread and I found it indulgent as well as quaint this time around. It reminded me most of her diaries (the first volume was In My Mind’s Eye) and would be ideal for reading in tandem with those. Morris writes, “I am emotionally in thrall to Welshness.” I couldn’t help but think of biographer Sara Wheeler’s words about Morris’s contradictions: “she was a famous chronicler of the British Empire (some say an apologist for it) and a card-carrying Welsh nationalist. She was singular and contrary”. Wheeler slept in this house, in Morris’s bed, after her death while working through the papers.
I’ve always meant to source more from this National Geographic Directions series of brief travel books in which authors celebrate a beloved place. The only other I’ve read is Land’s End, Michael Cunningham’s book on Provincetown. (Free from The Book Thing of Baltimore)
For Advent last year and Lent this year, my church put on special evening compline services that combine liturgy and folk-inspired music my husband helped with. Earlier this month we had an extraordinary R.S. Thomas-themed service with some poems read aloud from the pulpit and others set to avant-garde music (a theremin was ruled out, but a harmonium, melodeon and glockenspiel featured, as well as a mandolin, banjo, toy piano and electric guitar). I was mostly unfamiliar with Thomas, who was a priest as well as a poet, and was gobsmacked by the commingling of scientific and theological vocabulary and the tolerance of doubt. Here are some extracts.
It is this great absence
that is like a presence,
that compels me to address it without hope
of a reply.
You speak
all languages and none,
answering our most complex
prayers with the simplicity
of a flower, confronting
us, when we would domesticate you
to our uses, with the rioting
viruses under our lens.
You have made God small,
setting him astride
a pipette
And all this in a carefully assembled pamphlet that I’ve kept as a souvenir.
I might not have chosen the best books this year, but I’m still feeling well disposed towards the Welsh. A nice link is that Thomas lived just a few miles from Morris. In her book she calls him “perhaps the greatest Welsh poet writing in English since George Herbert.” She describes him thus: “I last set eyes on R. S. Thomas standing all alone beside our coastal road gazing silently into an adjacent wood, as though communing with the crows and blackbirds in its branches … Whenever I recall him at the roadside that day, looking silently into the trees as though the answer to all things was to be found among them, the memory gives me a sense of calm and liberation, as Wales itself does”.
Three for the First Day of Spring: Renkl, Sukegawa and Tucker
I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer.
~I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Happy spring! (Although the blossom is fading and, going by the temperature the past few days, you might think it was early summer here.) When I borrowed the psychological thriller The First Day of Spring from the library, I decided to consider that my built-in review deadline. As is my wont, I’ve turned it into a trio with two books more laterally related to spring: a lovely book of miniature autobiographical essays about interactions with family and the natural world, and a short Japanese novel about misfits who find belonging at a pancake restaurant.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl (2019)
My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.
The memoir in flash essays is one of my favourite niche forms. (Beth-Ann Fennelly and Abigail Thomas also do it exceptionally well.) It took me a long time to promote this book from occasional bedside reading pile to daytime stack, but at a certain point it became impossible to let it out of my hands for very long. I had to smell it and browse her brother Billy’s collage artworks. Each piece is somewhere between a paragraph and several pages long, and they make up a rough chronology of a life, from her grandmother’s memories of the 1930s onward (the passages in italics are interview transcripts) through to the present day.
Renkl grew up in Alabama in the 1960s–70s, in the sort of mildly dysfunctional family that most of us probably have. She contrasts what she knew as a child with what she didn’t. It was a happy childhood but. (Her mother’s recurring mental health problems and racial tensions in the South would be two ways to finish that sentence.) There were hounds and porch seats and three kids in the backseat on vacations. There were funerals and old love songs and Bible verses and playing in the woods. Grandmother tells of births and deaths, and Renkl remembers life’s transitions: getting her first period, being so homesick that she couldn’t finish college in Philadelphia, adjusting to early motherhood and then to an empty nest – an appropriate metaphor because many of the essays are about birds Renkl watches feeding and nesting. She isn’t naïve; she knows nature is cruel. Not every fledgling will survive and majestic hawks will kill equally beautiful songbirds. She realizes how dire the situation is for monarch butterflies, too, but keeps planting milkweed at her Nashville home.
This balancing of appreciation for life and acceptance of death is at its finest in the late pieces on her parents’ death. Her mother, like mine, died suddenly after a stroke, and her words on that loss are exquisite as well as painful. Still, she asserts, “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”
Like Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Renkl brings a poet’s eye for language and an amateur’s awe at the natural world to her micro-essays. She calls a cedar waxwing “An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation.” This is a book to cherish and learn from and reread. (Birthday gift from my sister from my wish list) 
{SPOILERS IN THESE NEXT TWO REVIEWS}
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (2013; 2017)
[Translated from Japanese by Alison Watts]
It was the colours (especially that wash of cherry-blossom pink) that first attracted me to this book, and the foodie theme that kept me reading. Sentaro manages a small shop on Cherry Blossom Street, Doraharu, which sells dorayaki – pancakes filled with sweet bean paste (“during cherry-blossom season petals sometimes drifted in, falling into the pancakes as they cooked”). He takes little pride in the work; it’s just a way to keep busy and pay off his debts from the time he was in prison for drug-dealing. When an elderly woman named Tokue offers to make the sweet bean paste for a pittance, he decides to give her a trial even though he usually orders it in bulk. Tokue’s homemade is so much better that the shop is soon making record profits. She trains Sentaro up in the art of making the perfect paste, which to her is a mystical process that involves listening to the beans. Not only does Tokue have new ideas for the menu, but she also makes troubled teenage customers such as Wakana welcome with friendly conversation. Along with Marvy the canary, these three form a fragile little family.
But then rumours start spreading about Tokue and her health, and Doraharu’s owner threatens to shut the place down if Sentaro doesn’t let her go. It turns out that she had Hansen’s disease (the preferred term for leprosy) and lives in a sanatorium. Even though she has long since been cured, there is still a stigma, and when she was young she could only find love and community among her fellow patients. In an Author’s Note, Sukegawa explains that the legislation keeping Hansen’s patients isolated was only repealed in 1996. His philosophy, made explicit in the letters Tokue writes to Sentaro after leaving the shop, is that one doesn’t have to be useful to have a meaningful life; simply being alive and observing is enough. I found Tokue saccharine: too wise, good and all-forgiving. This is easy reading, yet the dialogue felt stiff, the characterization thin, the letters unsubtle, and the detail of confectionery-making too technical. Secondhand – public library book sale) 
The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker (2021)
I’d very much admired Tucker’s first two books – The Time in Between, a memoir of her childhood anorexia; and especially That Was When People Started to Worry, case studies of young women’s mental health – so asked my library to purchase her debut novel. Tucker is a trainee clinical psychiatrist. The psychological insight she’s developed professionally and through writing about herself and others served her well in crafting this portrait of a deprived girl who murders other children. I could have included it in my Mother’s Day post because, as in the similarly dark Like Mother (by Jenny Diski), it’s the lack of a mother’s love that leaves the protagonist numb and unsure of how to bring up her own daughter.
It’s no whodunit because eight-year-old Chrissie admits in the novel’s first line, “I killed a little boy today.” The mystery is why, and how she’s ultimately caught. It’s the first day of spring when she commits that first murder, of a toddler who lives on the same rough housing estate. Her house isn’t much of a home with no money for electricity, no food in the cupboards, an emotionally absent mother and a father who comes and goes without warning. Chrissie is always hungry, always craving. She couldn’t stand that Steven was loved and coddled while she had nothing. Harbouring “a delicious secret” gives her a “belly-fizzing feeling … like sherbet exploding in my guts. … That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world.” She wants to tell people what she’s done, but knows she mustn’t.
It’s also the first day of spring when five-year-old Molly falls from a seawall and breaks her wrist. Her mum, Julia, panics when she gets a call from child social services. It becomes clear by the second chapter that Julia is the new name Chrissie was given when she left the residential home for child offenders to start a new life. Sure that they’ll blame her and take Molly away, she gets on a train back to her old neighbourhood to see Mam and her childhood best friend, Linda. “I remembered this in Mam – the pull and push, cling and reject.” The subject matter might have become unbearable had Tucker emphasized the salacious details. Instead, she casts a compassionate eye on generational patterns of neglect and incompetence – patterns that can be broken through hard work. It’s riveting reading, and Julia’s love for Molly and Linda’s enduring friendship brought tears to my eyes. (Public library) 
Reading Ireland Month, Part I: Wendy Erskine and Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin
St. Patrick’s Day is a good occasion for my first set of contributions to Cathy’s Reading Ireland Month. Today I have two 2025 debut novels by women, one about the ripples caused by a sexual assault; the other about grief, queerness and unease with the Catholic Church. Both come with a Women’s Prize seal of approval. As I write, I happen to be listening to the new Foy Vance album I picked up today, which has inspired me to choose a few relevant (Northern) Irish songs to accompany each book.
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine
I loved Erskine’s short story collection Dance Move so was looking forward to this before it appeared on the Women’s Prize longlist. We’re introduced to three middle-aged Belfast women whose 18-year-old sons are charged with sexual assault: Frankie Levine, stepmother to Chris; Miriam Abdel Salam, mother of Rami; and Bronagh Farrell, mum of Lyness or “Line-up.” Frankie grew up in care but is now rich beyond her wildest dreams, Miriam was recently widowed by a car accident, and Bronagh heads a children’s services charity. Misty, the classmate who accused the boys of the assault at a party, lives with her stepfather, cab driver Boogie. As rumours spread, the mothers have confabs to prepare a united front. At one level they’re horrified by what their sons were capable of (Rami used a bottle), but on another they’ve decided that it’s just a hullabaloo – Bronagh’s word – that will die down soon.
Slut-shaming of Misty starts early: she has a “Bennyz” amateur porn account and did phone or video chats, very mild stuff, with men all over the world. It’s uncomfortable, though realistic, how money and class steer what happens next. The book’s title comes from the soft-porn site, but in a wider sense invites the question of who funds lifestyles and so who’s really in control. People who have compassion in general can’t find it in this situation. Erskine intersperses short sections from anonymous voices, such as policemen and partygoers, with the narrative. These are well done, and sometimes quite funny, but Erskine’s meta joke – “There can be just too many perspectives” – proves true in that the interludes add little we haven’t already grasped about the direction of the local gossip. Apart from Misty, I felt I’d hardly gotten to know any of the characters by the end. The novel also suffered from being the second novel about the aftermath of a gang rape I’ve read in three months (after Who Killed Bambi? by Monika Fagerholm, translated from Swedish). But I reckon its blend of grit and heart is likely to please readers of Colin Barrett and Lisa McInerney.
Northern Irish songs for Misty:
- “Collect Yourself” by Iain Archer
- “At Least My Heart Was Open” by Foy Vance (beware the F-bomb)
& an Irish one: “The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice
Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin
This was one of my Most Anticipated titles in 2025. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Discoveries Award (for manuscripts in progress) in 2022 and won the PFD Queer Fiction Prize. Jacinta, who prefers to be known as Jay, is in her late twenties, living in London, working in marketing and half-serious about her relationship with her girlfriend, Lindsay. She tries not to think about Ireland, religion, or the past: her mother’s mental health struggles, her extended family’s casual homophobia, and the fact that her older brother, Ferdia, who was a trainee Catholic priest in Rome, died in a freak accident when she was 16. But it all comes back for her when her parents tell her that there is a campaign to have Ferdia canonized. While her mother scurries around making speeches and verifying miracles, Jay seeks the opposite for her brother: to be remembered as a normal, flawed and perhaps closeted human.
It took me ages to read this, despite the undemanding first-person, present-tense narration, because the early London material is so monotonous. Unlike the Erskine (probably because that is her third book), this felt very much like a debut, where a lot of earnest apprentice work has had to go into getting characters from A to B, literally and emotionally. Any time the author wants to advance the plot, she has Jay meet someone in a bar for a conversation. Without fail, there will be drinks involved. This felt to me like a stereotype of the Irish. It’s only really in the last quarter, as Jay has honest conversations with both parents, deals with her grief over Ferdia and accepts how much Lindsay means to her, that the book soars. For me, that was too little too late, even though the themes were irresistible.
A Northern Irish song for Jay:
- “Freewheel” by Duke Special
- and (for Jay and Lindsay) “Crack the Shutters” by Snow Patrol
& an Irish one: “The Trailing Skirts of God” by Bell X1
I loved the premise of both of these novels, but the execution left me slightly disappointed. Still, I wouldn’t discourage you from picking them up if they’ve caught your eye; I know that some blogger friends have liked one or the other much better than I did.
I’ll raise a cheeky glass of Bailey’s tonight to the greatness of Irish literature. Speaking of which, I’ll have another, bigger batch of reviews coming up before the end of the month!
Three on a Theme for Mother’s Day: Baker, Diski and Sampson
It’s Mothering Sunday in the UK today, so, like last year, I’m featuring three very different books about mothers and motherhood: a memoir, a novel and a poetry anthology. There are complex emotions at play in the first two due to grief, abuse and disability. The poems are cheerier (thankfully) and reflect on the experience of motherhood but also of being mothered. On that last point, I’ve added my response to a relevant short story I happened to read today.
Reading My Mother Back: A memoir in childhood animal stories by Timothy C. Baker (2022)
Baker is a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Aberdeen. His first non-academic publication is a curiously beguiling novella-length reappraisal of favourite children’s books. “To misquote Heraclitus, you cannot read the same book twice.” While he’s sheepish about including so many 19th- and early-20th-century white male authors, he can’t do otherwise as these are the texts that first taught him about death, loneliness and friendship: Charlotte’s Web, The Wind in the Willows, The Magician’s Nephew and Watership Down. (Also The Secret Garden.) Baker grew up in Maryland and Vermont, lonesome and closeted, with parents who briefly joined a cult. In his memory, his mother (who had been abused) always suffered with chronic illness and pain. In each chapter, he weaves together a discussion of a plot with stories from his early life and critical opinion on the value of rereading. It helped that I was familiar with six of the nine books Baker features (and others by Gallico, though not The Man Who Was Magic); I’d not even heard of Merle the High Flying Squirrel or The Book of the Dun Cow.
I spotted this in the Wigtown Festival Shop* on our 2023 visit to Scotland’s Book Town and could hardly believe it existed because it seemed so perfectly suited to me: I loved animal books, especially Watership Down, as a child; I’ll read any bereavement memoir going; I grew up 30 miles from Baltimore, where Baker spent his early life; he and I both had strict religious upbringings; and his mother experienced kidney failure (after eating a foxglove??), a link to my family’s history of kidney disease. There are plentiful differences, too, of course, but Baker emphasises connection. “If reading these books has taught me anything,” he concludes, “it is that all of my stories are individual, and all of them are universal. What we share is the unshareability of our grief … [but also] the joy of knowing that we have loved.” And for such a seemingly niche book (from Goldsmiths Press), I have actually found myself mentioning it to two blogger friends in recent days, so that’s proof he was right. 
[*As to how the book finally came into my possession: I added it to my wishlist and an acquaintance (a former mayor of Newbury, in fact) bought it for me for my 40th birthday. However, he forgot to bring the gift to our joint party and it took another 2+ years to extract it from him – through explicit reminders when we invited him to join us on a quiz team.]
Like Mother by Jenny Diski (1988)
I’ve enjoyed the late Jenny Diski’s travel memoirs (Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train) and essays (On Trying to Keep Still). This novella was my first taste of her fiction and, while it’s dark as hell, I admired the psychological acuity and playfulness with narration. Occasional chapters introduce a dialogue between Nony and an imaginary interlocutor whose role is to listen to the story of her mother, Frances, a former dancer. That family history is the substance of the rest of the book, which is in an omniscient third person. The artificiality of the setup is blatant, though; Nony can neither think nor speak, having been born without a brain (hydranencephaly). Nony’s full name, Nonentity, is thus Frances’s cruel joke.
By necessity, the story stretches back to Frances’s parents, Ivy and Gerald, whose postwar optimism soon ceded to the reality of addiction, adultery and the attrition of love. A semiferal Frances escaped her unhappy home for the streets of London and engaged in sex play with Stuart on a bombsite. This went on for years. For Stuart, it blossomed into genuine love, but the numb Frances could never return his feelings and only used him. There are some really painful scenes here, such as Stuart stealing ether from the chemistry supply cupboard so she can huff herself into temporary oblivion, and a drunk Ivy molesting adolescent Frances. “Like mother, like daughter” is a bitter confirmation of inherited trauma. Nony might well be a symbolic manifestation of Frances’s desire to cultivate nothingness. To the extent that she is a literal baby – I’m really not sure – Frances does seem to love her and care for her physical needs, even as she’s grateful that the relationship will be short-lived.
Diski draws attention to the falsity of her narrative technique at the very end. It’s a disturbing yet intriguing novel that I think must be trying to make a wider point about postwar disillusionment. (Enough to make one question one’s growing antipathy towards Boomers?) I was reminded faintly of Nutshell by Ian McEwan, which is from the perspective of a fetus, and I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf, a troubling story of a mentally ill mother and her disabled son. I have another novella plus a short story collection by Diski on the shelf, and I daresay after those I’ll have to seek out everything else she wrote. (University library)
Night Feeds and Morning Songs, ed. Ana Sampson (2021)
“I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.”
~Liz Berry
It would have been easy to make such an anthology samey and sentimental, so kudos to Sampson for curating a solid mix of contemporary and period work. The poems are grouped into loose categories covering pregnancy, the sleepless nights of early motherhood, the power of womanly solidarity, the legacy (or absence) of one’s own mother, and the milestones of life as a child grows up and moves away. (Jackie Kay marvels that her baby boy is now a 6-foot-2 world traveller.) However, there are almost as many emotional approaches and poetic forms as there are contributors. Exhilaration meets exhaustion; guilt and grief threaten to overwhelm the good times. Sometimes the infant is addressed directly. The tone might be sombre, outraged or satirical. A few excerpts:
from “Labour Ward Prayer” by Vicky Thomas
Give us this day our daily miracle.
Exchange our offering of sweat and tears
and, most of all, of blood,
for new life, crumpled as a new leaf bud.
from “The Visitor” by Idra Novey
…more dragon
than spaniel, more flammable
than fluid …
All wet mattress to my analysis,
he’s stayed the loudest and longest
of any houseguest
from “What My Kids Will Write about Me in Their Future Tell-All Book” by January Gill O’Neil
They will say that no was my favourite word,
More than stop, or eat, or love.
That some morning, I’d rather stay in bed,
laptop on lap, instead of making breakfast
…
They will say they have seen me naked.
Front side, back side – none of which
were my good side.
I enjoyed re-encountering work by some personal favourite poets such as Caroline Bird, though most entries were new to me. Sampson’s section introductions aren’t particularly illuminating and often reference poems that aren’t actually in the part in question. Some of the 19th-century and earlier material is quaintly twee, but I did love discovering Christina Rossetti’s “To My First Love, My Mother.” This is the poem that made me cry, though:
(Little Free Library)
And a bonus short story:
“Egg Mother” by Kim Samek (from I Am the Ghost Here): I’m two stories into Samek’s gently surreal collection. This second story combines the themes of parenting and grief prevalent above. Her openings are knockout: “At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg. It happens a few months after I give birth.” In therapy, the narrator discovers that she’s been repressing her grief over her mother, who died of cancer when the narrator was 13. The therapist suggests that she and her husband hold a joint ‘funeral’ for her mother and her younger self in a graveyard. But even after the ritual, she doesn’t return to herself. It’s a sobering but realistic message: some things one just doesn’t get over.
“Every story that I read becomes the story of my mother.”
~Timothy C. Baker
Last night, we saw Brooklyn expat singer-songwriter Annie Dressner (and Sean Duggan of Steady Habits) in concert at a church hall. I was mostly underwhelmed by her quirky confessional songs and little-girl voice, but a couple of songs stood out for me. One, “I Just Realized,” includes the line “And I hope that I can be just like my mother.”
Today was a more emotional day than I was expecting. I got a sweet posy from church, but having a whole service focussed on mothers and mothering was hard for me. I had to mostly switch off to get through it.
Just in my current stack, there are so many books about mothers or mothering…
the loss of a mother (Eva Luna by Isabel Allende; The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith) – so common an element in novels that I have to think it’s shorthand for a character who has to pluckily rely on their own psychological resources- mothers’ protective instinct (The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine)
- emotional distance from an unstable mother (Carrie by Stephen King; First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis; Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates; The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker, which also includes the struggle to be a good mother in turn)
- mixed feelings about the inability to have a child (Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth)
- a mother’s grief at the loss of a child (Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin)
I know it’s a subject I’ll be reading and thinking about for the rest of my life.
Three on a Theme: English Seasons and Flora (Brazier, Lamb and Parker)
These three books trace the turning of a typical year of the English seasons, especially as experienced through flora: produce for a veg stall, plants laid into a traditional hedge, and “weeds” celebrated for their wild beauty.
The Honesty Box: The diary of a broken marriage, a mental health crisis and a large marrow by Lucy Brazier (2025)
From one Christmas season to the next, Brazier highlights the delights and challenges of rural living (in the Bridport–Lyme Regis area of Dorset). She takes on a project of setting up and stocking her own honesty box – an unmanned roadside produce stall where visitors pay into a cashbox – with garden produce, preserves and baked goods, plus friends’ crafts. All along, her marriage is in an extended, low-level crisis: Steve’s bluntness, lack of social skills, and panicked inability to do his share of household tasks have long been issues. When he gets a combined ADHD and autism diagnosis, he has a roadmap but no easy solution. Going on medication and finding peers in a similar situation help somewhat, but he still struggles.
Brazier draws clever parallels between the turning of the seasons and the ebb and flow of a marriage. Wild swimming with friends and countryside walks with Margot the dog are ways of communing with nature. She incorporates all the daily concerns of her midlife existence, including home repairs, menopause and seeing Raff, the oldest of their three children, off to university. Brazier used to be a PFD talent agent in London, dealing with the likes of Anna Maxwell Martin, then worked for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his River Cottage cookery empire (she wrote their Christmas book); she’s now a freelance ghostwriter. She’s gently nostalgic for the days of balancing early motherhood and a stressful career, but also grateful for the slower pace of life she’s found in the countryside. There are also some amusingly ill-fated holidays (camping and boating), contrasted with a luxurious one in Italy.
It’s all very affable, the month-by-month present-tense write-ups offering an appealing blend of realism about life’s unpredictability and strategies for muddling through. While it may mean most to women of a certain age or those with neurodivergence in the family, anyone in a long-term relationship will find much to relate to. (Public library)
Of Thorn and Briar: A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer by Paul Lamb (2025)
I picked this up after it was shortlisted (and highly commended) for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. Lamb’s lifestyle could be from the 19th century: he lives in a sparse, cosy wagon, driving it from place to place and pausing for weeks-long projects laying traditional hedges across southwest England. Autumn through late winter is his key work period, to avoid the bird-nesting season. It’s gruelling physical labour. Sometimes he sees he’s made a difference; when he gets discouraged, he has to remind himself to take a longer view. “The hedger, like the forester, has to think of his work not as something completed in days or weeks or even months, but instead in years, decades and centuries.” Lamb can’t help but notice the daily shifts in weather adding up to changing seasons; it all affects his daily work.
This gets reasonably technical about the different qualities of tree species and what they’re like to work with. I learned, or at least was reminded of, the vocabulary word “pleaching,” which means cutting a thin tree trunk vertically – almost but not all the way through – and laying horizontal branches into the crease. It takes skill to describe practical actions in a way that laypeople can picture. However, this account, which covers one August through the following July, is quite monotonous and repetitive. I blame the simple past-tense narration, which quickly becomes an ‘I did this, then I did that’ rundown and had me skimming more than half of the time. Literary techniques would have helped break up the format: extended flashbacks to his apprenticeship or family life, more scenes and dialogue, and some lyrical or imagined passages. (There is one particularly nicely done Hardy-esque vignette where he converses with Dorset locals in a pub.)
During the pandemic, Lamb’s daughters encouraged him to start an Instagram account, which now has 195,000 followers. No doubt it was his social media fame that led to this book deal. His writing, though serviceable, lacks sparkle. I enjoyed it as a window onto a rare profession and nearly forgotten way of life, but would hesitate to recommend unless you have patience and a greater-than-average interest in the subject matter. (Public library) 
Understorey: A Year Among Weeds by Anna Chapman Parker (2024)
(One of my best backlist reads of last year.) Parker set out to study and sketch weeds as a way of cultivating attention and stillness as well as celebrating the everyday and overlooked. Her quick black-and-white drawings and written observations bear witness to the seasons changing but also to the minute alterations she observes in herself and her children. Here are a couple of examples of shorter entries:
25 April
Wild garlic flowers are explosive. As so often in drawing[,] there is a slippery negotiation between fidelity (getting the shape right) and spirit (capturing the feel of it). By the third drawing I’ve got my eye in and the balance between the two is nearer the mark. If I stayed here a week in the grass, drawing a single flower in a single stroke with my eyes closed, maybe eventually I’d hit it bang-on true.
10 December
On my way back from the shops, I find myself detouring to check in on the sowthistle again. Its leaves are drier now and the crisping at the edges is spreading inward. The leftward lean is more pronounced. A few more of the flowers have gone over. But there’s something else, as well – some impression of a former intimacy. A sensation not only of the past flower, but of my past self here, two days ago. Through the drawn encounter, the plant allows me to recognise myself, passing.
Taking a half-hour out of her day to find a subject feels transgressive in one sense, but dutiful – even holy – in another. Along with her frequent illustrations, there are reproductions of other artworks that depict wildflowers in situ, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf (1503). The tone is high-brow, meditative, introspective as she focuses on being present. This was just my kind of nature book, and all the more special because I’ve holidayed in her home of Berwick-on-Tweed so could picture some of the ‘overgrown’ spaces she honours. 
With thanks to Duckworth for the proof copy for review.
Eleventh Blog Anniversary (& International Women’s Day)
Bookish Beck launched 11 years ago today. I find that hard to believe as I still feel like a newbie in the blogging world compared to veterans like Annabel, Kim, Laura, Liz and Simon; imposter syndrome (Imposter Foster!) strikes again. And yet I can’t really remember what it was like before I had a blog, nor can I imagine life without one.
Pratyya Ghosh, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This is my 1594th post, which means I’m maintaining an average of 2.8 posts per week. I feel like I’m posting less often these days, with most of my reviews clumping around the end of a month as I scramble to report back on library reads and finish everything I’ve started towards particular challenges.
It’s also International Women’s Day, a coincidence I would have been unaware of when I started the blog. The Women’s Prize longlist is always announced at around this time of year, with the Carol Shields Prize longlist to follow on Tuesday. I’ve read three of the Women’s Prize nominees (Castillo, Hutchinson and King) and skimmed another (Choi). I’m currently reading Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors, which is also just right for Reading Ireland Month.
To mark the day, I’ll reproduce my review of one of the best books I’ve read by a woman recently. It’s one of my early favourites for the year.
Brawler by Lauren Groff
The nine short stories in Lauren Groff’s exceptional eighth book profile women in states of desperation and probe legacies of loss and violence.
Most of the stories employ third-person narration and originally appeared in the New Yorker. Often, inherited trauma binds mothers and daughters. The title character is high school swimmer Sara, who shoplifts and fights in frustration at her mother’s incurable illness. In “Under the Wave,” set after a natural disaster, a woman adopts an orphan as a replacement for her dead child—despite their racial differences. The title of “The Wind” symbolizes women’s fear and rage after an attempted escape from an abusive patriarch. Accidental harm and imagery of the Madonna and Child link the three mother–daughter pairs in “Annunciation.”
Themes of midlife reinvention and latent queerness (cf. Matrix) recur. Bisexuality is a secret between a dying woman and her friend in “Birdie.” In “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” a woman finds new hobbies following early retirement. Although she flirts with her female gardening teacher, she realizes her desire is not to leave her husband but to “brush up against the dazzling future again.”
“Such Small Islands” is a startling Jamesian fable; “To Sunland” a 1950s Southern gothic black comedy that would do Flannery O’Connor proud; and the masterful “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” a suspenseful, novella-length examination of privilege and obsession.
The prose is stellar and the endings breathtaking. Groff is a first-rate novelist, but her short stories are truly peerless.
(Reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)
Thanks to all who support my blog by reading and commenting. You’re stars!
Literary Wives Club: Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell (1959)
This is the best thing we’ve read in my time with the Literary Wives online book club (out of 16 books so far). In the early pages it reminded me of Richard Yates’s work, but by the end I was thinking of it as on par with Stoner by John Williams, a masterpiece I reread last year. Is Mrs. Bridge a female Stoner? In that she is an Everywoman, representative of a certain comfortable, conventional interwar life but also of common longings to be purposeful, experience novelty, and connect with others – I’d say yes. From the first line onwards, we see her as at odds with the facts of her life, which at least appear to her to be unalterable: “Her first name was India – she was never able to get used to it.” She’s never lived up to her exotic name, she feels; her parents must have expected something of her that she couldn’t be.
Connell (1924–2013) sets this portrait of a marriage in his native Kansas City, Missouri. The story is not contemporaneous to its publication but begins in the 1930s; this doesn’t become clear until two-thirds of the way through when, on a European tour that workaholic lawyer Walter Bridge arranged as a belated birthday gift to his wife, news comes that the Nazis have invaded Poland and they have to hurry home. Bear in mind that this is the man who refused to move when a tornado threatened their country club and every single other person had moved to the basement. He insisted on staying at the table and finishing his steak. (So … he expects the weather to bow to his will, if not world leaders?) It’s an astonishing scene, and occasions an astute summation of their relationship dynamic:
It did not occur to Mrs Bridge to leave her husband and run to the basement. She had been brought up to believe without question that when a woman married she was married for the rest of her life and was meant to remain with her husband wherever he was, and under all circumstances, unless he directed her otherwise. She wished he would not be so obstinate; she wished he would behave like everyone else, but she was not particularly frightened. For nearly a quarter of a century she had done as he told her, and what he had said would happen had indeed come to pass, and what he had said would not occur had not occurred. Why, then, should she not believe him now?
(That attitude of blind faith seems more appropriate in a father–daughter or God–mortal relationship than husband–wife, does it not?)
The structure of the book must have been groundbreaking for its time: it’s in 117 short, titled vignettes – a fragmentary style later popularized by writers such as Elizabeth Hardwick, Sarah Manguso and Jenny Offill – that build a picture of the protagonist and her milieu. Even though many of them seem to concern minor incidents from the Bridges’ social life (parties, gossip, the bores they’re forced to have lunch with every time they’re in town), they also reveal a lot about India’s outlook. She wears stockings even on the hottest summer days because “it was the way things were, it was the way things had always been, and so she complied.” Like many of her time and place, she is a casual racist, evidenced by comments on her children’s Black and “gypsy” friends. It pains her that she doesn’t understand her three children. To her it seems they do strange, shocking things (okay, Douglas building a tower of junk is pretty weird) when really they’re just experimenting with fashion and sexuality as any teenager would.
India is in awe of the women of her acquaintance who step out of line, like Grace Barron and Mabel Ong. Grace, in particular, is well informed and confident arguing with men. India seriously considers breaking away from Walter and voting liberal at the next election, but loses her nerve at the last minute; her viewpoint is fundamentally conservative. The novel justifies this by showing how those who flout social rules are shamed or punished in some way.
Mostly, India feels pointless. With a housekeeper around, there’s nothing for her to do. She has nothing but leisure time she doesn’t know how to fill. And yet the years fly past, propelling her into middle age. Occasionally, she’ll summon the motivation to sign up for painting classes or start learning Spanish via records, but she never follows through. So it’s just unnecessary shopping trips in a massive Lincoln she never figures out how to park properly.
She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. … Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed.
It may be fashionable to scorn the existential despair of the privileged, but this is a potent picture of a universal condition. It’s all too easy to get stuck in the status quo and feel helpless to change life for the better. I came across a Slightly Foxed article (Spring 2016) by William Palmer, “The Sadness of Mrs Bridge.” Palmer suggests that Connell was an oddity to his publishers because he wrote in so many genres, and never the same kind of book twice. He dubs this Connell’s finest work. I marked out a couple of passages from his appreciation:
The genius of Connell is to show that this is how most people live: first in their own minds, then in their families, then in their limited social circles; most historical novels fail to realize that most people simply do not notice whatever great moments of history are being enacted around them unless they actually impinge upon their lives.
What is truly compelling about Mrs Bridge is her very ordinariness, notwithstanding all her petty snobbery, conformism and timidity. The list is easy to make and appears to be a fairly damning indictment, but Connell is not writing a satirical portrait. His intention is to show us the utter uniqueness of this one human life, irreplaceability of body and soul that is India Bridge. Connell portrays her so tenderly that we come to sympathize with her and, more, to care for her.
{SOME SPOILERS IN THE REMAINDER}
The way Mrs. Bridge ends indicates that Mr. Bridge, which was published 10 years later, will be not a sequel but a companion piece. I’m somewhat wary of reading it, but it will be intriguing to see how events overlap and to what extent Connell is able to make Walter a more sympathetic character. (Palmer remarks, “It is terrifying how little the two portraits have in common – they might be describing two entirely different worlds.”) Connell’s work remains influential: Claire Fuller has featured the pair of novels in one of her year-end reading roundups, and the husband’s surname in Manguso’s Liars is Bridges.
I’ve written much more than I intended to about Mrs. Bridge, but wanted to do justice to what will no doubt be one of my stand-out reads of the year.
(My omnibus edition came from the free bookshop we used to have in the local mall.)
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Based on Mrs. Bridge’s experience, one would be excused for thinking that being a wife involves the complete suppression of one’s own personality, ambitions and desires – including sexual, as dealt with very succinctly in the first chapter: Walter usually initiates; the one time she tries to do so, he gives her a patronizing hug and falls asleep. “This was the night Mrs Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.” A wry statement from Connell as marriage is certainly not equitable in this novel.
Granted, this was the 1910s–1930s. By the 1940s, when her daughters are young women, they’re determined to live differently, the one by becoming a New York City career girl, single and promiscuous. The other also vows to do things differently – “Listen, Mother, no man is ever going to push me around the way Daddy pushes you around” – yet ends up pregnant and battered. When India tries to encourage her to placate her husband through sex, she replies, “Oh no, don’t tell me that! I don’t want any part of that myth.”
So we see attitudes starting to change, but it would be another couple of decades before there were more options for both of these generations of women.
A common observation in many of the novels we’ve considered is that, even in a marriage, it is possible for the partners to be a complete mystery to each other. I’ll be interested to see whether Walter’s side of the story illuminates anything or portrays him as clueless. And a main moral I draw from most of our reads is that defining oneself by any relationship – mostly marriage, but also parenthood – sets one up for disappointment, or worse.
See the reviews by Becky, Kate, Kay and Naomi, too!
We recently welcomed a new member, Marianne, and will soon be choosing our books for the next two-plus years. Here’s the club page on Kay’s blog with the current members’ profiles plus all the books covered since 2013.
Our next selection will be Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri in June. I’ve not read Lahiri before but have always meant to, so I’m particularly looking forward to this one.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 