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, she 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.
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 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.
Book Serendipity, Mid-November–Early January
This is a short set but I’ll post it now to keep things ticking over. I’ve lost nearly a week to the upper respiratory virus from hell, and haven’t felt up to sitting at my computer for any extended periods of time. I had to request extensions on a few of my work deadlines; I’ll hope to be back to normal blogging next week, too.
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away! Feel free to join in with your own.
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- Ayot St Lawrence as a setting in Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff and Flesh by David Szalay.
- A man who has panic attacks in Pan by Michael Clune and All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun.
- Two of my Shelf Awareness PRO (early) reviews in a row were of 2026 novels set on a celebrity/reunion cruise: All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun, followed by American Fantasy by Emma Straub. In both, the narrative alternates between three main characters, the cruise is to celebrate a milestone birthday for a passenger’s relative, and there’s a celebrity who’s in AA.
- A teacher–student relationship develops into a friendship in The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly (with Molly McCully Brown, whose Places I’ve Taken My Body I’ve reviewed) and Lessons from My Teachers by Sarah Ruhl (with Max Ritvo, about whom she wrote a whole book).
Someone becomes addicted to benzodiazepines in The Pass by Katriona Chapman and All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun (both 2026 releases).
- A New York City event scheduled to occur on September 15 or 16, 2001 is postponed because of 9/11 in Joyride by Susan Orlean (her wedding) and All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun (a cruise departure – it’s moved to Boston).
- A 1960s attempted suicide by putting one’s head in a gas oven in The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson and The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor.
- A plan to eat cheese to induce dreams in The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman and Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth.
- An author is (at least initially) aghast at the liberties taken with an adaptation of her book in Spent by Alison Bechdel and Joyride by Susan Orlean (the film Adaptation, one of my favourites, bears little relation to her nonfiction work The Orchid Thief, which I also love).
- A North American author meets her British publishers, André Deutsch and Diana Athill, in Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood and Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff. (Atwood also mentions Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the title reference in the Hanff.)
- An older white woman feels compelled to add, as an aside after a memory of slightly dodgy behaviour observed, that cultural appropriation was not a thing in those days in Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood and Winter by Val McDermid.
- I read two books in 2025 with a title taken from a Christian Wiman poem: A Truce that Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews, then Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer.
- A special trip undertaken for a younger sister’s milestone birthday: a road trip through Scotland in a campervan in Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth for a 40th; and a boy band reunion cruise to the Bahamas for a 45th in American Fantasy by Emma Straub.
- A reference to Sartre’s “hell is other people” line (paraphrased) in Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo and The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas.
- The clock-drawing test as a shorthand for assessing a loved one’s dementia in Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood (her partner Graeme) and Joyride by Susan Orlean (her mother).
A sexual encounter between two men is presaged by them relieving themselves side by side at urinals in A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland and The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas.
- An older man who knows he’s having a stroke just wants to sit quietly in a chair and not be taken to hospital in Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood (her partner Graeme) and The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr.
- A man who’s gone through Alcoholics Anonymous gets dangerously close to falling off the wagon: picks up a bottle of gin in a shop in The Names by Florence Knapp / buys a drink at a bar in All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun.
- I was reading two nonfiction books with built-in red ribbon bookmarks at the same time: Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood and Robin by Stephen Moss.
- Homoeopathy is an element in The Names by Florence Knapp and The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas.
- A character named Sparrow in Spent by Alison Bechdel and Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin.
- A mention of special celebrations for a Korean mother’s 70 birthday in Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo and All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun.
- Some kinky practices in Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin and Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood.
- A girl from an immigrant family reads Greek mythology for escape in Visitations by Julia Alvarez and The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson.
- “View halloo” (originally a fox-hunting term) is used as a greeting in Talking It Over by Julian Barnes and Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stevens.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
R.I.P. Reads, Part II: Feito, King, Link, Paver & Taylor
Soon it’ll be all novellas, all the time around here. But first I have a few more October reads to review.
A belated Happy Halloween! As a kid in the U.S. suburbs, I loved Halloween. It was such fun planning costumes – pumpkin, cowgirl and picnic table are a few memorable ones that I remember thanks to photographs – and my hoard of candy would last me for months. But these days, I tend to be pretty grumpy about the holiday. It never used to be a thing in the UK, but it has been creeping in year on year. I don’t mind a creatively carved jack o’ lantern, tasteful decoration or clever homemade costume. What does get my goat is plastic tat, gratuitous gore and the dozens of sodden sweets and wrappers littering the streets after last night’s rain and wind.
Anyway, we enjoyed the stormy evening because we spent it at friends’ having delicious autumnal lasagne and parkin, playing instruments and board games and eavesdropping on the trick-or-treaters. I had to laugh when J said “Take a couple” and one little girl replied, “That’s okay, I don’t really like sweeties.” These friends were keeping some ancient traditions alive: carving a turnip, wearing one’s clothes inside out and walking between two fires to ward off fairies. They also put potatoes in the treats bowl, which definitely confused the kids. (One did take a spud!)
I really leaned into the Readers Imbibing Peril reading this year. I had a somewhat lacklustre first batch, but these five were great!
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito (2025)
This was among my Most Anticipated titles of the year – for the bonkers blurb but also because of how much I’d enjoyed Feito’s debut, Mrs. March. Both novels go deep with mentally disturbed protagonists. The first channeled Patricia Highsmith with its stylish psychological suspense; here we have a full-on blend of slasher horror and sadistic humour, wrapped up in a Victorian pastiche. Winifred Notty (naughty girl indeed) is the new governess at Ensor House on the Yorkshire moors. She couldn’t care less about her charges, Andrew and Drusilla. No, she’s here to exact revenge on the master of the house, Mr. Pounds. But not before she’s dispatched many a random servant and baby. “Bodies pile up in the attic.” Her brutal fantasies are so realistic that at times it’s difficult to separate them from what she actually carries out. Miss Notty is also a highly sexual being whose fixations could certainly be interpreted in Freudian ways. Feito spins a traumatic backstory for her antiheroine but doesn’t make it any excuse for her gleeful reign of terror. It’s delicious fun, especially for a Victorianist, but don’t attempt if you’re squeamish. (Read via NetGalley)
Misery by Stephen King (1987)
All these years I’d had two 1989–1990 films conflated: Misery and My Left Foot. I’ve not seen either but as an impressionable young’un I made a mental mash-up of the posters’ stills into a film featuring Daniel Day-Lewis as a paralyzed writer and Kathy Bates as a madwoman wielding an axe. (Turns out the left foot is relevant!)
Paul Sheldon wakes in a fog of pain, his legs shattered from a one-car accident on a snowy Colorado backroad. He’s famous for his historical potboilers about Misery Chastain but, like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, has killed off his most beloved character. Except now he’s in the home of Annie Wilkes, his rescuer and biggest fan, and she demands he resurrect Misery. Annie is a former nurse who left the profession after numerous suspicious deaths on her watch. She keeps Paul dependent on her – and on Novril, a fictional opiate. In a case of ‘Scheherazade complex’, he’ll be her prisoner until he’s completed a sequel that’s to her satisfaction. Compared to Pet Sematary, the only other King novel I’ve read, this was slow to draw me in because of the repetitive scenes in a claustrophobic setting, and I wearied of the excerpts from Paul’s manuscript. But eventually I was riveted, desperate to know how Paul was going to get out of this predicament and what the final showdown could be. Extremes of pain and obsession make this an intense study of the psychology of a wretched pair. (Public library)
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link (2008)
This is a reissue edition geared towards young adults. All but one of the 10 stories were originally published in literary magazines or anthologies. The stories are long, some approaching novella length, and took me quite a while to read. I got through the first three and will save the rest for next year. In “The Wrong Grave,” a teen decides to dig up his dead girlfriend’s casket to reclaim the poems he rashly buried with her last year – as did Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Link makes a point of mentioning. A terrific blend of spookiness and comedy ensues.
“The Wizards of Perfil” and the title story are 50-some and 60-some pages, respectively, which allows a lot of space for intriguing weirdness and side plots. In the former, Onion’s cousin Halsa is purchased to be a servant to a wizard. The cousins both have the gift of foresight but can’t get the wizards to take them seriously when they beg that something to be done to prevent human disasters. It’s a brilliant allegory of the danger of waiting for an external force – God, the government, whatever – to solve everything versus getting on with it yourself. In the title story, a group of teens are obsessed with a mysterious Doctor Who-esque television show called The Library, which colours all their interactions. The main character Jeremy’s father is an eccentric sci-fi novelist named Gordon Strangle Mars who has written his son into his latest plot in a disturbing way. Jeremy recently inherited a gas station and phone box in Las Vegas and occasionally calls the phone box to air his grievances and solicit supernatural aid. My only other experience of Link was a standalone story I was once sent for review, “The Summer People,” which I didn’t get on with, so I was surprised to encounter such top-notch fantasy/horror tales. (Little Free Library)
Rainforest by Michelle Paver (2025)
I’d read all three of Paver’s previous horror novels for adults (Thin Air, Dark Matter and Wakenhyrst) and found them easy, atmospheric reading but not nearly as scary as billed. This is her best yet. Set in 1973 on an expedition to Mexico, it has as its unreliable narrator Dr. Simon Corbett, an English entomologist. Adding to the findings of the archaeological dig he’s accompanying, he’ll be hunting for mantids (praying mantises, stick insects and the like) by fogging sacred trees with pesticides. He also experiments with taking a hallucinogenic plant extract used by the Indigenous shamans, hoping to be reunited with his lost love, Penelope.
We know that Corbett’s employment is tenuous and that he’s seeing a therapist. Paver authentically reproduces the casual racism and sexism of the time and seeds little hints that this protagonist may not be telling the whole truth about his relationship with Penelope. The long sequence where he’s lost in the jungle is fantastic. Corbett seems fated to repeat ancient masochistic rites, as if in penance for what he’s done wrong. My husband is an entomologist, so I was interested to read about period collecting practices. The novelty of the setting is a bonus to this high-quality psychological thriller and ghost story. (Public library)
Bone Broth by Alex Taylor (2025)
Ash is a trans man who starts working at a hole-in-the-wall ramen restaurant underneath a London railway arch. All he wants is to “pay for hormones, pay rent, [and] make enough to take a cutie on a date.” Bug’s Bones is run by an irascible elderly proprietor but staffed by a young multicultural bunch: Sock, Blue, Honey and Creamy. They quickly show Ash the ropes and within a month he’s turning out perfect bowls. He’s creeped out by the restaurant’s trademark bone broth, though, with its reminders of creatures turning into food. At the end of a drunken staff party, they find Bug lying dead and have to figure out what to do about it.
This storyline is in purple, whereas the alternating sequences of flashbacks are in a fleshy pinkish-red. As the two finally meet and meld, we see Ash trying to imitate the masculinity he sees on display while he waits for the surface to match what’s inside. I didn’t love the drawing style – though the full-page tableaux are a lot better than the high-school-sketchbook small panes – so that was an issue for me throughout, but this was an interesting, ghoulish take on the transmasc experience. Taylor won a First Graphic Novel Award.
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
And one DNF: Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley. (I was warned!) It had no menace or momentum at all…
Any stand-out creepy reading for you this year?
20 Books of Summer, 19–20: Emily St. James and Abraham Verghese
Going out on a high! My last three books for the challenge (also including Beautiful Ruins) were particularly great, just the sort of absorbing and rewarding reading that I wish I could guarantee for all of my summer selections.
Woodworking by Emily St. James (2025)
Colloquially, “woodworking” is disappearing in plain sight; doing all you can to fade into the woodwork. Erica has only just admitted her identity to herself, and over the autumn of 2016 begins telling others she’s a woman – starting with her ex-wife Constance, who is now pregnant by her fiancé, John. To everyone else, Erica is still Mr. Skyberg, a 35-year-old English teacher at Mitchell High involved in local amateur dramatics. When Erica realizes that not only is there another trans woman in her small South Dakota town but that it’s one of her students, Abigail Hawkes, she lights up. Abigail may be half her age but is further along in her transition journey and has sassy confidence. But this foul-mouthed new mentor has problems of her own, starting with parents who refuse to refer to her by her chosen name. Abigail lives with her adult sister instead, and gains an unexpected surrogate family via her boyfriend Caleb, a Korean adoptee whose mother, Brooke Daniels, is directing Our Town. Brooke is surprisingly supportive given that she attends Isaiah Rose’s megachurch.
As Trump/Pence signs proliferate, a local election is heating up, too: Pastor Rose is running for State Congress on the Republican ticket, opposed by Helen Swee. Erica befriends Helen and becomes faculty advisor for the school’s Democrat club (which has all of two members: Abigail and her Leslie Knope-like friend Megan). The plot swings naturally between the personal and political, emphasizing how the personal business of 1% of the population has been made into a political football. Chapters alternate between Abigail in first person and Erica in third. The characters feel utterly real and the dialogue is as genuine as the narrative voices. The support group Erica and Abigail attend presents a range of trans experiences based on when one came of age. Some are still deep undercover. There’s a big reveal I couldn’t quite accept, though I can see its purpose. It’s particularly effective how St. James lets second- and third-person narration shade into first as characters accept their selves. Grey rectangles cover up deadnames all but once, making the point that even allies can get it wrong.
This was pure page-turning enjoyment with an important message to convey. It reminded me a lot of Under the Rainbow by Celia Laskey but also had the flavour of classic Tom Perrotta (Election). In the Author’s Note, St. James writes, “They say the single greatest determinant of whether someone will support and affirm trans people is if they know a trans person.” I feel lucky to count three trans people among my friends. It’s impossible to make detached pronouncements about bathrooms and slippery slopes if you care about people whose rights and very existence are being undermined. We should all be reading books by and about trans women. (New purchase from Bookshop.org)
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (2023)
All too often, I shy away from doorstoppers because they seem like too much of a time commitment. Why read 715 pages in one novel when I could read 3.5 of 200 pages each? Yet there’s something special about being lost in the middle of a great big book and trusting that wherever the story goes will be worthwhile. I let this review copy languish on the shelf for over TWO YEARS when I should have known that the author of the amazing Cutting for Stone couldn’t possibly let me down. Verghese’s second novel is very much in the same vein: a family saga that spans decades and in every generation focuses on medical issues. Verghese is a practicing doctor as well as a Stanford professor and you can tell he glories in the details of hand and brain surgeries, disability and rare diseases – and luckily, so do I.
Wider events play out in the background (wars, partition, the fall of the caste system), but the focus is always on one family in Kerala, starting in 1900 when a 12-year-old girl is brought to the Parambil estate for her arranged marriage to a 40-year-old widower. One day she will be Big Ammachi, the matriarch of a family with a mysterious Condition: In every generation, someone drowns. As a result, they all avoid water, even if it requires going hours out of their way. Her son Philipose longs to be a scholar, but is so hard of hearing that his formal education is cut short. He becomes a columnist in a local newspaper and marries Elsie, a spirited artist. Their daughter, Mariamma, trains as a doctor. In parallel, we follow the story of Digby Kilgour, a Glaswegian surgeon whose career takes him to India. Through Digby and Mariamma’s interactions with colleagues, we watch colonial incompetence and sexism play out. Addiction and suicide recur across the years. Destiny and choice lock horns. I enjoyed the window onto the small community of St. Thomas Christians and felt fond of all the characters, including Damodaran the elephant. It’s also really clever how Verghese makes the Condition a cross between a mystical curse and a diagnosable ailment. An intellectual soap opera that makes you think about storytelling, purpose and inheritance, this is extraordinary. 
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the proof copy for review.
I read 10 of the books I selected in my initial planning post. I’m pleased that I picked off a couple of long-neglected review copies and several recent purchases. The rest were substituted at whim. There were two duds, but the overall quality was high, with 10 books I rated 4 stars or higher! Along with the above and Beautiful Ruins, Pet Sematary and Storm Pegs were overall highlights. I also managed to complete a row on the Bingo card, a fun add-on. And, bonus: I cleared 7 books from my shelves by reselling or giving them away after I read them.
May Releases, Part II (Fiction): Le Blevennec, Lynch, Puchner, Stanley, Ullmann, and Wald
A cornucopia of May novels, ranging from novella to doorstopper and from Montana to Tunisia; less of a spread in time: only the 1980s to now. Just a paragraph on each to keep things simple. I’ll catch up soon with May nonfiction and poetry releases I read.
Friends and Lovers by Nolwenn Le Blevennec (2023; 2025)
[Translated from French by Madeleine Rogers]
Armelle, Rim, and Anna are best friends – the first two since childhood. They formed a trio a decade or so ago when they worked on the same magazine. Now in their mid-thirties, partnered and with children, they’re all gripped by a sexual “great awakening” and long to escape Paris and their domestic commitments – “we went through it, this mutiny, like three sisters,” poised to blow up the “perfectly executed choreography of work, relationships, children”. The friends travel to Tunisia together in December 2014, then several years later take a completely different holiday: a disaster-prone stay in a lighthouse-keeper’s cottage on an island off the coast of Brittany. They used to tolerate each other’s foibles and infidelities, but now resentment has sprouted up, especially as Armelle (the narrator) is writing a screenplay about female friendship that’s clearly inspired by Rim and Anna. Armelle is relatably neurotic (a hilarious French blurb for the author’s previous novel is not wrong: “Woody Allen meets Annie Ernaux”) and this is wise about intimacy and duplicity, yet I never felt invested in any of the three women or sufficiently knowledgeable about their lives.
With thanks to Peirene Press for the free copy for review.
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
“The fluke of being born at a slightly different time, or in a slightly different place, all that might gift you or cost you.” At events for Small, Lynch’s terrific memoir about how she and her wife had children, women would speak up about how different their experience had been. Lesbians born just 10 or 20 years earlier didn’t have the same options. Often, they were in heterosexual marriages because that’s all they knew to do; certainly the only way they thought they could become mothers. In her research into divorce cases in the UK in the 1980s, Lynch learned that 90% of lesbian mothers lost custody of their children. Her aim with this earnest, delicate debut novel, which bounces between 2022 and 1982, is to imagine such a situation through close portraits of Heron, an ageing man with terminal cancer; his daughter, Maggie, who in her early forties bears responsibility for him and her own children; and Dawn, who loved Maggie desperately but felt when she met Hazel that she was “alive at last, at twenty-three.” How heartbreaking that Maggie knew only that her mother abandoned her when she was little; not until she comes across legal documents and newspaper clippings does she understand the circumstances. Lynch made the wise decision to invite sympathy for Heron from the start, so he doesn’t become the easy villain of the piece. Her compassion, and thus ours, is equal for all three characters. This confident, tender story of changing mores and steadfast love is the new Carol for our times. (Such a lovely but low-key novel was liable to make few ripples, so I’m delighted for Lynch that the U.S. release got a Read with Jenna endorsement.)
With thanks to Chatto & Windus (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Dream State by Eric Puchner
If it starts and ends with a wedding, it must be a comedy. If much of the in between is marked by heartbreak, betrayal, failure, and loss, it must be a tragedy. If it stretches towards 2050 and imagines a Western USA smothered in smoke from near-constant forest fires, it must be an environmental dystopian. Somehow, this novel is all three. The first 163 pages are pure delight: a glistening romantic comedy about the chaos surrounding Charlie and Cece’s wedding at his family’s Montana lake house in the summer of 2004. First half the wedding party falls ill with norovirus, then Charlie’s best friend, Garrett (who’s also the officiant), falls in love with the bride. Do I sound shallow if I admit this was the section I enjoyed the most? The rest of this Oprah’s Book Club doorstopper examines the fallout of this uneasy love triangle. Charlie is an anaesthesiologist, Cece a bookstore owner, and Garrett a wolverine researcher in Glacier National Park, which is steadily losing its wolverines and its glaciers. The next generation comes of age in a diminished world, turning to acting or addiction. There are still plenty of lighter moments: funny set-pieces, warm family interactions, private jokes and quirky descriptions. But this feels like an appropriately grown-up vision of idealism ceding to a reality we all must face. I struggled with a lack of engagement with the children, but loved Puchner’s writing so much on the sentence level that I will certainly seek out more of his work. Imagine this as a cross between Jonathan Franzen and Maggie Shipstead.
With thanks to Sceptre (Hodder) for the proof copy for review.
Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley
Coralie is nearing 30 when her ad agency job transfers her from Australia to London in 2013. Within a few pages, she meets Adam when she rescues his four-year-old, Zora, from a lake. That Adam and Coralie will be together is never really in question. But over the next decade of personal and political events, we wonder whether they have staying power – and whether Coralie, a would-be writer, will lose herself in soul-destroying work and motherhood. Adam’s job as a political journalist and biographer means close coverage of each UK election and referendum. As I’ve thought about some recent Jonathan Coe novels: These events were so depressing to live through, who would want to relive them through fiction? I also found this overlong and drowning in exclamation points. Still, it’s so likable, what with Coralie’s love of literature (the title is from The Group) and adjustment to expat life without her mother; and secondary characters such as Coralie’s brother Daniel and his husband, Adam’s prickly mother and her wife, and the mums Coralie meets through NCT classes. Best of all, though, is her relationship with Zora. This falls solidly between literary fiction and popular/women’s fiction. Given that I was expecting a lighter romance-led read, it surprised me with its depth. It may well be for you if you’re a fan of Meg Mason and David Nicholls.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for the proof copy for review.
Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann (2021; 2025)
[Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken]
Ullmann is the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and film director Ingmar Bergman. That pedigree perhaps accounts for why she got the opportunity to travel to Paris in the winter of 1983 to model for a renowned photographer. She was 16 at the time and spent the whole trip disoriented: cold, hungry, lost. Unable to retrace the way to her hotel and wearing a blue coat and red hat, she went to the only address she knew – that of the photographer, K, who was in his mid-forties. Their sexual relationship is short-lived and unsurprising, at least in these days of #MeToo revelations. Its specifics would barely fill a page, yet the novel loops around and through the affair for more than 250. Ullmann mostly pulls this off thanks to the language of retrospection. She splits herself both psychically and chronologically. There’s a “you” she keeps addressing, a childhood imaginary friend who morphs into a critical voice of conscience and then the self dissociated from trauma. And there’s the 55-year-old writer looking back with empathy yet still suffering the effects. The repetition made this something of a sombre slog, though. It slots into a feminist autofiction tradition but is not among my favourite examples.
With thanks to Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
The Bayrose Files by Diane Wald
In the 1980s, Boston journalist Violet Maris infiltrates the Provincetown Home for Artists and Writers, intending to write a juicy insider’s exposé of what goes on at this artists’ colony. But to get there she has to commit a deception. Her gay friend Spencer Bayrose has a whole sheaf of unpublished short stories drawing on his Louisiana upbringing, and he offers to let her submit them as her own work to get a place at PHAW. Here Violet finds eccentrics aplenty, and even romance, but when news comes that Spence has AIDS, she has to decide how far she’ll go for a story and what she owes her friend. At barely over 100 pages, this feels more like a long short story, one with a promising setting and a sound plot arc, but not enough time to get to know or particularly care about the characters. I was reminded of books I’ve read by Julia Glass and Sara Maitland. It’s offbeat and good-natured but not top tier.
Published by Regal House Publishing. With thanks to publicist Jackie Karneth of Books Forward for the advanced e-copy for review.
A Family Matter was the best of the bunch for me, followed closely by Dream State.
Which of these do you fancy reading?
Short Stories in September, II: Willie Davis, Gerald Durrell, Sue Mell and Lore Segal
Four more collections down. Two of them blend fictional and autobiographical modes. Two are set primarily in New York City, with another hanging out in Kentucky and the fourth touring Europe. Three of the authors were new to me and one is an old favourite. I’m borrowing Marcie’s five-sentence review format to keep things simple.
I Can Outdance Jesus by Willie Davis (2024)
I don’t often take a look at unsolicited review copies, but I couldn’t resist the title of this and I’m glad I gave it a try. Davis’s 10 stories, several of flash length, take place in small-town Kentucky and feature a lovable cast of pranksters, drunks, and spinners of tall tales. The title phrase comes from one of the controversial songs the devil-may-care narrator of “Battle Hymn” writes. My two favourites were “Kid in a Well,” about one-upmanship and storytelling in a local bar, and “The Peddlers,” which has two rogues masquerading as Mormon missionaries. I got vague Denis Johnson vibes from this sassy, gritty but funny collection; Davis is a talent!
Published by Cowboy Jamboree Press. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the free e-copy for review.
The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium by Gerald Durrell (1979)
If you’ve read his autobiographical trilogy or seen The Durrells, you’ll be familiar with the quirky, chaotic family atmosphere that reigns in the first two pieces: “The Picnic,” about a luckless excursion in Dorset, and “The Maiden Voyage,” set on a similarly disastrous sailing in Greece (“Basically, the rule in Greece is to expect everything to go wrong and to try to enjoy it whether it does or not”). No doubt there’s some comic exaggeration at work here, especially in “The Public School Education,” about running into a malapropism-prone ex-girlfriend in Venice, and “The Havoc of Havelock,” in which Durrell, like an agony uncle, lends volumes of the sexologist’s work to curious hotel staff in Bournemouth. The final two France-set stories, however, feel like pure fiction even though they involve the factual framing device of hearing a story from a restaurateur or reading a historical manuscript that friends inherited from a French doctor. “The Michelin Man” is a cheeky foodie one with a surprisingly gruesome ending; “The Entrance” is a full-on dose of horror worthy of R.I.P. I wouldn’t say this is essential reading for Durrell fans, but it was a pleasant way of passing the time. (Secondhand – Lions Bookshop, Alnwick, 2021)
A New Day by Sue Mell (2024)
Three suites of linked stories focus on young women whose choices in the 1980s have ramifications decades later. Chance meetings, addictions, ill-considered affairs, and random events all take their toll. Emma house-sits and waitresses while hoping in vain for her acting career to take off; “all she felt was a low-grade mourning for what she’d lost and hadn’t attained.” My favourite pair was about Nina, who is a photographer’s assistant in “Single Lens Reflex” and 13 years later, in “Photo Finish,” bumps into the photographer again in Central Park. With wistful character studies and nostalgic snapshots of changing cities, this is a stylish and accomplished collection.
Published by She Writes Press on September 3. With thanks to publicist Caitlin Hamilton Summie for the free e-copy for review.
Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal (2023)
The first section contains nine linked stories about a group of five elderly female friends. Bessie jokes that “wakes and funerals are the cocktail parties of the old,” and Ruth indeed mistakes a shivah for a party and meets a potential beau who never quite successfully invites her on a date. One of their members leaves the City for a nursing home; “Sans Teeth, Sans Taste” is a good example of the morbid sense of humour. A few unrelated stories draw on Segal’s experience being evacuated from Vienna to London by Kindertransport; “Pneumonia Chronicles” is one of several autobiographical essays that bring events right up to the Covid era – closing with the bonus story “Ladies’ Zoom.” The ladies’ stories are quite amusing, but the book as a whole feels like an assortment of minor scraps; it was published when Segal, a New Yorker contributor, was 95. (Secondhand – National Trust bookshop, 2023)
Postscript: Segal died on 7 October 2024, aged 96.
I’ll have a couple more reviews roundups between now and early October.
Currently reading: The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, The Skeleton in the Cupboard by Lilija Berzinska; The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue; The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff; Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston; Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags by Shena Mackay; How to Disappear by Tara Masih; The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken; Like Life by Lorrie Moore; The Long Swim by Teresa Svoboda; In Love and Trouble by Alice Walker
20 Books of Summer, 17–18: Suzanne Berne and Melissa Febos
Nearly there! I’ll have two more books to review for this challenge as part of roundups tomorrow and Saturday. Today I have a lesser-known novel by a Women’s Prize winner and a set of personal essays about body image and growing up female.
A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne (2001)
Berne won the Orange (Women’s) Prize for A Crime in the Neighbourhood in 1999. This is another slice of mild suburban suspense. The Boston-area Cook-Goldman household faces increasingly disruptive problems. Architect dad Howard is vilified for a new housing estate he’s planning, plus an affair that he had with a colleague a few years ago comes back to haunt him. Hotshot lawyer Mirella can’t get the work–life balance right, especially when she finds out she’s unexpectedly pregnant with twins at age 41. They hire a new nanny to wrangle their two under-fives, headstrong Pearl and developmentally delayed Jacob. If Randi Gill seems too good to be true, that’s because she’s a pathological liar. But hey, she’s great with kids.
It’s clear some Bad Stuff is going to happen to this family; the only questions are how bad and precisely what. Now, this is pretty much exactly what I want from my “summer reading”: super-readable plot- and character-driven fiction whose stakes are low (e.g., midlife malaise instead of war or genocide or whatever) and that veers more popular than literary and so can be devoured in large chunks. I really should have built more of that into my 20 Books plan! I read this much faster than I normally get through a book, but that meant the foreshadowing felt too prominent and I noticed some repetition, e.g., four or five references to purple loosestrife, which is a bit much even for those of us who like our wildflowers. It seemed a bit odd that the action was set back in the Clinton presidency; the references to the Lewinsky affair and Hillary’s “baking cookies” remark seemed to come out of nowhere. And seriously, why does the dog always have to suffer the consequences of humans’ stupid mistakes?!
This reminded me most of Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan and a bit of Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, while one late plot turn took me right back to The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller. While the Goodreads average rating of 2.93 seems pretty harsh, I can also see why fans of A Crime would have been disappointed. I probably won’t seek out any more of Berne’s fiction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
Girlhood by Melissa Febos (2021)
I was deeply impressed by Febos’s Body Work (2022), a practical guide to crafting autobiographical narratives as a way of reckoning with the effects of trauma. Ironically, I engaged rather less with her own personal essays. One issue for me was that her highly sexualized experiences are a world away from mine. I don’t have her sense of always having had to perform for the male gaze, though maybe I’m fooling myself. Another was that it’s over 300 pages and only contains seven essays, so there were several pieces that felt endless. This was especially true of “The Mirror Test” (62 pp.) which is about double standards for girls as they played out in her simultaneous lack of confidence and slutty reputation, but randomly references The House of Mirth quite a lot; and “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” (74 pp.), which ponders why Febos has such trouble relaxing at a cuddle party and whether she killed off her ability to give physical consent through her years as a dominatrix.
“Wild America,” about her first lesbian experience and the way she came to love a perceived defect (freakishly large hands; they look perfectly normal to me in her author photo), and “Intrusions,” about her and other women’s experience with stalkers, worked a bit better. But my two favourites incorporated travel, a specific relationship, and a past versus present structure. “Thesmophoria” opens with her arriving in Rome for a mother–daughter vacation only to realize she told her mother the wrong month. Feeling guilty over the error, she remembers other instances when she valued her mother’s forgiveness, including when she would leave family celebrations to buy drugs. The allusions to Greek myth were neither here nor there for me, but the words about her mother’s unconditional love made me cry.
I also really liked “Les Calanques,” which again draws on her history of heroin addiction, comparing a strung-out college trip to Paris when she scored with a sweet gay boy named Ahmed with the self-disciplined routines and care for her body she’d learned by the time she returns to France for a writing retreat. This felt like a good model for how to write about one’s past self. “I spend so much time with that younger self, her savage despair and fleeting reliefs, that I start to feel as though she is here with me.” The prologue, “Scarification,” is a numbered list of how she got her scars, something Paul Auster also gives in Winter Journal. As if to insist that we can only ever experience life through our bodies.
Although I’d hoped to connect to this more, and ultimately felt it wasn’t really meant for me (and maybe I’m a deficient feminist), I did admire the range of strategies and themes so will keep it on the shelf as a model for approaching the art of the personal essay. I think I would probably prefer a memoir from Febos, but don’t need to read more about her sex work (Whip Smart), so might look into Abandon Me. If bisexuality and questions of consent are of interest, you might also like Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace, which I reviewed for BookBrowse. (Gift (secondhand) from my Christmas wish list last year)
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?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 