#NovNov25 Catch-Up: Dodge, Garner, O’Collins, Sagan and A. White
As promised, I’m catching up on five novella-length works I finished in November. In fiction, I have an odd duck of a family story, a piece of autofiction about caring for a friend with cancer, a record of an affair, and a tale of settling two new cats into home life in the 1950s. And in nonfiction, a short book about the religious approach to midlife crisis.
Fup by Jim Dodge (1983)
I’d never heard of this but picked it up because of my low-key project of reading books from my birth year. After his daughter died in a freak accident, Grandaddy Jake Santee adopted his grandson “Tiny.” With that touch of backstory dabbed in, we’re in the northern California hills in 1978 with grandfather and grandson – now 99 and 22, respectively. Tiny builds fences, while Grandaddy is famous for his incredibly strong, home-distilled whiskey, “Ol’ Death Whisper.” One day, Tiny rescues a filthy creature from a posthole where it’s been chased by their nemesis, Lockjaw the wild boar. It turns out to be a duckling that grows into a hen mallard named Fup Duck (it’s a spoonerism…) who eats so much she’s too heavy to fly. Grandaddy plans to continue drinking and gambling indefinitely, but the hunt for Lockjaw – who he thinks may be a reincarnation of his Native American friend, Seven Moons – breaks the household apart. This was very weird: it starts out a mixture of grit (those grotesque Harry Horse drawings!) and Homer Hickam schmaltz and then goes full Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) [89 pages] 
The Spare Room by Helen Garner (2008)
Who knew there was such a market for novels about helping a friend through cancer treatment? Or maybe it’s just that I love them so much I home right in on them. As a work of autofiction – the no-nonsense narrator, Helen, gives her old friend Nicola a place to stay in Melbourne for several weeks while she undergoes experimental procedures – this is most like What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez (but I also had in mind Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg, We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman, and Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer). Helen thinks The Theodore Institute peddles quack medicine, whereas Nicola is willing to shell out thousands of dollars for its coffee enemas and vitamin C infusions, even though they leave her terrifyingly fragile. Nicola is the only character who doesn’t acknowledge that her case is terminal. The pages turn effortlessly as Helen covers her frustration with Nicola, Nicola’s essential optimism, and the realities of living while dying. “Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her.” I’ll read more by Garner for sure. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) [195 pages] 
Second Journey: Spiritual Awareness and the Mid-Life Crisis by Gerald O’Collins SJ (1978; 1995)
O’Collins, a Jesuit priest, sought a more constructive term than “midlife crisis” for the unease and difficult decisions that many face in their forties. He chooses instead the language of journeys, specifically one embarked upon because a previous way of life was no longer working. There are several types of triggers that O’Collins illustrates through brief case studies of famous individuals or anonymous acquaintances. The shift might be prompted by a sense of failure (John Wesley, Jimmy Carter), by literal exile (Dante), by falling in love (someone who left the priesthood to marry), by experiencing severe illness (John Henry Newman) or fighting in a war (Ignatius of Loyola), or simply by a longing for “something more” (Mother Teresa). But there are only two end points, O’Collins offers: a new place or situation; or a fresh appreciation of the old one – he quotes Eliot’s “to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” This is practical and relatable, but light on actual advice. It also pales by comparison to Richard Rohr’s more recent work on spirituality in the different stages of life (especially in Falling Upward). (Free from a church member’s donations) [100 pages] 
A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan (1956)
[Translated from French by Irene Ash]
Law student Dominique is lukewarm on her boyfriend Bertrand and starts seeing his married uncle, Luc, instead. The high point is when they manage to go on a ‘honeymoon’ trip of several weeks to Avignon. Both Bertrand and Luc’s wife, Françoise, eventually find out, but everyone is very grown-up about it. The struggle is never external so much as within Dominique to accept that she doesn’t mean as much to Luc as he does to her, and that the relationship will only be a little blip in her early adulthood. I found this a disappointment compared to Bonjour Tristesse and Aimez-Vous Brahms – it really is just the story of an affair; nothing more – but Sagan is always highly readable. I read this in two days, a big section of it on a chilly beach in Devon. In its frank, cool assessment of relationship dynamics, this felt like a model for Sally Rooney. I had to laugh at the righteously angry and rather ungrammatical marginalia below (“To hate Avignon is unpossible”). (University library) [112 pages]
Minka and Curdy by Antonia White; illus. Janet and Anne Johnstone (1957)
After Mrs Bell’s formidable cat Victoria dies, she hankers to get a new kitten to keep her company – she works at home as a writer. She finds herself greeting all the neighbourhood cats and, in her enthusiasm to help a ‘stray’, accidentally overfeeds someone else’s pet with fresh fish. Her heart is set on a marmalade kitten, so she reserves one from an impending litter in Kent. But then the opportunity to take on a beautiful young Siamese female cat, for free, comes her way, and though she feels guilty about the ginger tom she’s been promised, she adopts Minka anyway. When Coeur de Lion (“Curdy”) arrives a few weeks later, her challenge is to get the kitties to coexist peacefully in her London flat. This reminded me so much of myself back in February and March, when I was so glum over losing Alfie that we rushed into adopting a giant kitten who has been a bit much for us. But we’re already contemplating getting Benny a little sister or two, so I read with interest to see how she made it happen. Well, this is fiction, so it starts out fraught but then is somewhat magically fine. No matter – White writes about cats’ antics and personalities with all the warmth and delight of Derek Tangye, Doreen Tovey and the like, and this 2023 Virago reprint is adorable. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) [113 pages] 
I also had a few DNFs last month:
- The Book of Colour by Julia Blackburn (1995) seemed a good bet because I’ve enjoyed some of Blackburn’s nonfiction and it was on the Orange Prize shortlist. But after 60 pages I still had no idea what was going on amid the Mauritius-set welter of family history and magic realism. (Secondhand – Bas Books charity shop, 2022)
- A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) lured me because I’d so loved Goodbye to Berlin and I remember liking the Colin Firth film. But this story of an Englishman secretly mourning his dead partner while trying to carry on as normal as a professor in Los Angeles was so dreary I couldn’t persist. (Public library)
- Night Life: Walking Britain’s Wild Landscapes after Dark by John Lewis-Stempel (2025) – JLS could write one of these mini nature volumes in his sleep. (Maybe he did with this one, actually?) I’d rather one full-length book from him every few years than bitty, redundant ones annually. (Public library)
- Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse (1974) – I’ve read one Jeeves & Wooster book before and enjoyed it well enough. This felt inconsequential, so as I already had way too many novellas on the go I sent it back whence it came. (Little Free Library)
Final statistics for #NovNov25 coming up tomorrow!
Book Serendipity, September through Mid-November
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.
Thanks to Emma and Kay for posting their own Book Serendipity moments! (Liz is always good about mentioning them as she goes along, in the text of her reviews.)
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- An obsession with Judy Garland in My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt (no surprise there), which I read back in January, and then again in Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage by Kelly Foster Lundquist.
- Leaving a suicide note hinting at drowning oneself before disappearing in World War II Berlin; and pretending to be Jewish to gain better treatment in Aimée and Jaguar by Erica Fischer and The Lilac People by Milo Todd.
- Leaving one’s clothes on a bank to suggest drowning in The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, read over the summer, and then Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet.
- A man expecting his wife to ‘save’ him in Amanda by H.S. Cross and Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage by Kelly Foster Lundquist.
A man tells his story of being bullied as a child in Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood and Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist.
- References to Vincent Minnelli and Walt Whitman in a story from Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue and Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist.
- The prospect of having one’s grandparents’ dining table in a tiny city apartment in Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist and Wreck by Catherine Newman.
- Ezra Pound’s dodgy ideology was an element in The Dime Museum by Joyce Hinnefeld, which I reviewed over the summer, and recurs in Swann by Carol Shields.
- A character has heart palpitations in Andrew Miller’s story from The BBC National Short Story Award 2025 anthology and Endling by Maria Reva.
- A (semi-)nude man sees a worker outside the window and closes the curtains in one story of Cathedral by Raymond Carver and one from Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin.
- The call of the cuckoo is mentioned in The Edge of Silence by Neil Ansell and Of All that Ends by Günter Grass.
A couple in Italy who have a Fiat in Of All that Ends by Günter Grass and Caoilinn Hughes’s story from The BBC National Short Story Award 2025 anthology.
- Balzac’s excessive coffee consumption was mentioned in Au Revoir, Tristesse by Viv Groskop, one of my 20 Books of Summer, and then again in The Writer’s Table by Valerie Stivers.
- The main character is rescued from her suicide plan by a madcap idea in The Wedding People by Alison Espach and Endling by Maria Reva.
- The protagonist is taking methotrexate in Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin and Wreck by Catherine Newman.
- A man wears a top hat in Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet and one story of Cathedral by Raymond Carver.
- A man named Angus is the murderer in Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet and Swann by Carol Shields.
The thing most noticed about a woman is a hair on her chin in the story “Pluck” in Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue and Swann by Carol Shields.
- The female main character makes a point of saying she doesn’t wear a bra in Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin and Find Him! by Elaine Kraf.
- A home hairdressing business in one story of Cathedral by Raymond Carver and Emil & the Detectives by Erich Kästner.
- Painting a bathroom fixture red: a bathtub in The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith, one of my 20 Books of Summer; and a toilet in Find Him! by Elaine Kraf.
- A teenager who loses a leg in a road accident in individual stories from A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham and the Racket anthology (ed. Lisa Moore).
- Digging up the casket of a loved one in the wee hours features in Pet Sematary by Stephen King, one of my 20 Books of Summer; and one story of Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link.
- A character named Dani in the story “The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea” by Sheila Heti and The Silver Book by Olivia Laing; later, author Dani Netherclift (Vessel).
Obsessive cultivation of potatoes in Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet and The Martian by Andy Weir.
- The story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up the poems he buried with his love is recounted in Sharon Bala’s story in the Racket anthology (ed. Lisa Moore) and one of the stories in Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link.
- Putting French word labels on objects in Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay and Find Him! by Elaine Kraf.
A man with part of his finger missing in Find Him! by Elaine Kraf and Lessons from My Teachers by Sarah Ruhl.
- In Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor, I came across a mention of the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who is a character in The Silver Book by Olivia Laing.
- A character who works in an Ohio hardware store in Flashlight by Susan Choi and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan (two one-word-titled doorstoppers I skimmed from the library). There’s also a family-owned hardware store in Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay.
- A drowned father – I feel like drownings in general happen much more often in fiction than they do in real life – in The Homecoming by Zoë Apostolides, Flashlight by Susan Choi, and Vessel by Dani Netherclift (as well as multiple drownings in The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, one of my 20 Books of Summer).
- A memoir by a British man who’s hard of hearing but has resisted wearing hearing aids in the past: first The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus over the summer, then The Edge of Silence by Neil Ansell.
A loved one is given a six-month cancer prognosis but lives another (nearly) two years in All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert and Lessons from My Teachers by Sarah Ruhl.
- A man’s brain tumour is diagnosed by accident while he’s in hospital after an unrelated accident in Flashlight by Susan Choi and Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley.
- Famous lost poems in What We Can Know by Ian McEwan and Swann by Carol Shields.
- A description of the anatomy of the ear and how sound vibrates against tiny bones in The Edge of Silence by Neil Ansell and What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher.
- Notes on how to make decadent mashed potatoes in Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist, Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry, and Lessons from My Teachers by Sarah Ruhl.
- Transplant surgery on a dog in Russia and trepanning appear in The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov and the poetry collection Common Disaster by M. Cynthia Cheung.
- Audre Lorde, whose Sister Outsider I was reading at the time, is mentioned in Lessons from My Teachers by Sarah Ruhl. Lorde’s line about the master’s tools never dismantling the master’s house is also paraphrased in Spent by Alison Bechdel.
- An adult appears as if fully formed in a man’s apartment but needs to be taught everything, including language and toilet training, in The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov and Find Him! by Elaine Kraf.
Two sisters who each wrote a memoir about their upbringing in Spent by Alison Bechdel and Vessel by Dani Netherclift.
- The fact that ragwort is bad for horses if it gets mixed up into their feed was mentioned in Ghosts of the Farm by Nicola Chester and Understorey by Anna Chapman Parker.
- The Sylvia Plath line “the O-gape of complete despair” was mentioned in Vessel by Dani Netherclift, then I read it in its original place in Ariel later the same day.
- A mention of the Baba Yaga folk tale (an old woman who lives in the forest in a hut on chicken legs) in Common Disaster by M. Cynthia Cheung and Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda. [There was a copy of Sophie Anderson’s children’s book The House with Chicken Legs in the Little Free Library around that time, too.]
- Coming across a bird that seems to have simply dropped dead in Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, Vessel by Dani Netherclift, and Rainforest by Michelle Paver.
- Contemplating a mound of hair in Vessel by Dani Netherclift (at Auschwitz) and Year of the Water Horse by Janice Page (at a hairdresser’s).
- Family members are warned that they should not see the body of their loved one in Vessel by Dani Netherclift and Rainforest by Michelle Paver.
- A father(-in-law)’s swift death from oesophageal cancer in Year of the Water Horse by Janice Page and Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry.
- I saw John Keats’s concept of negative capability discussed first in My Little Donkey by Martha Cooley and then in Understorey by Anna Chapman Parker.
- I started two books with an Anne Sexton epigraph on the same day: A Portable Shelter by Kirsty Logan and Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth.
- Mentions of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff and Sister Outsider for Audre Lorde, both of which I was reading for Novellas in November.
- Mentions of specific incidents from Samuel Pepys’s diary in Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff and Gin by Shonna Milliken Humphrey, both of which I was reading for Nonfiction November/Novellas in November.
- Starseed (aliens living on earth in human form) in Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino and The Conspiracists by Noelle Cook.
- Reading nonfiction by two long-time New Yorker writers at the same time: Life on a Little-Known Planet by Elizabeth Kolbert and Joyride by Susan Orlean.
- The breaking of a mirror seems like a bad omen in The Spare Room by Helen Garner and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
The author’s husband (who has a name beginning with P) is having an affair with a lawyer in Catching Sight by Deni Elliott and Joyride by Susan Orlean.
- Mentions of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift in Lessons from My Teachers by Sarah Ruhl and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer; I promptly ordered the Hyde secondhand!
- The protagonist fears being/is accused of trying to steal someone else’s cat in Minka and Curdy by Antonia White and Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse, both of which I was reading for Novellas in November.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
All Souls’ Day Reading: Armitage, Campbell, Mah & Perry
Along with my Halloween-tide R.I.P. reading (here and here), I’ve been reading books about ancestors and the dead – appropriate for All Saints’ Day (yesterday) and All Souls’ Day (today). Both are in the Church calendar but less a part of popular culture.
My mind naturally turns toward the dead as October advances: on the 30th, it was three years since my mother’s death (plus the 25th marked a year since we started losing sweet Alfie). To allay dread at the impending anniversary, I booked myself a treat to look forward to that day. For some reason, Wantage Literary Festival included a Gin Tasting Extravaganza alongside its bookish events. I didn’t fancy any book talks but was keen to try 10 British Isles gins, 9 of which were new to me and 5 of which were ticks in my 101 Gins to Try before You Die book.
Beforehand, I did some secondhand book shopping. Regent is an excellent and enormous maze of a bookshop that I’d been to once before. It has an exhaustive selection and great prices (£2.50 paperbacks / £3–5 hardbacks) that haven’t changed in three years. I considered this return trip a chance for another birthday book haul and was delighted with my finds (the Gleeson was from a charity shop in the town).
My All Souls’ stack includes a poetry collection and three #NonfictionNovember reads.
New Cemetery by Simon Armitage (2025)
Not far from the English Poet Laureate’s home in Huddersfield, some cow fields were recently converted into a municipal graveyard. I can’t do better than Armitage’s own description of the style in this collection: “short-lined tercets linked with/by intermittent rhymes and half-rhymes … like threading daisy chains.” Each one is titled in brackets after a species of moth, in a rather arbitrary way, as he acknowledges. The point was to – in a time of climate breakdown – include nature in the inevitable march of death and decay. I most liked the poems about the cemetery, whereas the majority of the book is about everyday moments from a writer’s life.
There are some amusing and poignant lines among the rest:
I died and went
to Bristol Parkway
for my sins,
interchange
between soul and flesh
the whispered half-rhymes
of earth and death
on the spade’s tongue.
I also appreciated this haiku-like stanza: “Almond blossom / slash rotten confetti / clogging the church drains.” But there was little that struck me otherwise. I’ve tried to love Armitage’s poetry, but this third experience again leaves me unmoved. I’ve preferred his travel memoirs. Still, the book ends on the perfect note:
the dead are patiently
killing time
between visiting hours,
deaf, blind, mute
and numb,
unable to love
but capable still
of being loved.
(Public library) 
I’ve read the first two chapters of a long-neglected review copy of All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell (2022), in which she shadows various individuals who work in the death industry, starting with a funeral director and the head of anatomy services for the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. In Victorian times, corpses were stolen for medical students to practice on. These days, more people want to donate their bodies to science than can usually be accommodated. The Mayo Clinic receives upwards of 200 cadavers a year and these are the basis for many practical lessons as trainees prepare to perform surgery on the living. Campbell’s prose is journalistic, detailed and matter-of-fact, but I’m struggling with the very small type in my paperback. Upcoming chapters will consider a death mask sculptor, a trauma cleaner, a gravedigger, and more. If you’ve enjoyed Caitlin Doughty’s books, try this.
I’m halfway through Red Pockets: An Offering by Alice Mah (2025) from the library. I borrowed it because it was on the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing shortlist. During the Qingming Festival, the Chinese return to their hometowns to honour their ancestors. By sweeping their tombs and making offerings, they prevent the dead from coming back as hungry ghosts. When Mah, who grew up in Canada and now lives in Scotland, returns to South China with a cousin in 2017, she finds little trace of her ancestors but plenty of pollution and ecological degradation. Their grandfather wrote a memoir about his early life and immigration to Canada. In the present day, the cousins struggle to understand cultural norms such as gifting red envelopes of money to all locals. This is easy reading but slightly dull; it feels like Mah included every detail from her trips simply because she had the material, whereas memoirs need to be more selective. But I’m reminded of the works of Jessica J. Lee, which is no bad thing.
Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry (2025)
Perry recognises what a sacred privilege it was to witness her father-in-law’s death, which occurred just nine days after his diagnosis with oesophageal cancer. She concludes, like Simone de Beauvoir does of her mother in A Very Easy Death, that David’s end was as good as one might hope for. Viz., he was in his late seventies, remained at home, was looked after by his son and daughter-in-law, more or less maintained his mental capacity until the end, and showed minimal signs of pain or distress. Still, every death is fraught, to some degree, with bureaucracy, medical error and pangs of regret. There is a searing encounter here with an unfeeling GP; on the other hand, there is such kindness from nurses, relatives and a pastor.
The beauty of Perry’s memoir is its patient, clear-eyed unfolding of every stage of dying, a natural and inexorable process that in other centuries would have been familiar to anyone – having observed it with siblings, children, parents, neighbours, distant relatives and so on. She felt she was joining a specifically womanly lineage of ministering, a destiny so quotidian that she didn’t feel uncomfortable with any of the intimate care involved. I thought of my sister and her mother- and sister-in-law sitting vigil at my brother-in-law’s deathbed in 2015.
Perry traces the physical changes in David as he moved with alarming alacrity from normal, if slowed, daily life to complete dependency to death’s door. At the same time, she is aware that this is only her own perspective on events, so she records her responses and emotional state and, to a lesser extent, her husband’s. Her quiver of allusions is perfectly chosen and she lands on just the right tone: direct but tender. Because of her and David’s shared upbringing, the points of reference are often religious, but not obtrusive. My only wish is to have gotten more of a sense of David alive. There’s a brief section on his life at the start, mirrored by a short “Afterlife” chapter at the end telling what succeeded his death. But the focus is very much on the short period of his illness and the days of his dying. During this time, he appears confused and powerless. He barely says anything beyond “I’m in a bit of a muddle,” to refer to anything from incontinence to an inability to eat. At first I thought this was infantilizing him. But I came to see it as a way of reflecting how death strips everything away.
As I read, I often had tears in my eyes, thinking of the deaths I have experienced at second hand and the many more that will come my way until my own. In this gift of a book, Perry captures the emotional poles of bearing witness, and the dignity and uniqueness of every life:
There was relief, and there was loss – it was the saddest thing we’d ever seen, and the best thing we had ever done – all these things existing together undiminished, and never cancelling each other out.
now I understand there are no ordinary lives – that every death is the end of a single event in time’s history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular.
(Public library) 
Death and grief are common topics in my stacks at all times of year. I see more books on dying and the dead in my immediate future, starting with two rereads for #NovNov – The Death of Ivan Ilych and Death in Venice, along with The Field by Robert Seethaler (narrated by the inhabitants of a cemetery), the latter two for #GermanLitMonth; and A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood.
Nonfiction November Book Pairings: Autistic Husbands & The Ocean
Liz is the host for this week’s Nonfiction November prompt. The idea is to choose a nonfiction book and pair it with a fiction title with which it has something in common.
I came up with these two based on my recent reading:
An Autistic Husband
The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion (also The Rosie Project and The Rosie Result)
&
Disconnected: Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage by Eleanor Vincent
Graeme Simsion’s Don Tillman trilogy tells the odd-couple story of an autistic professor and how he falls in love with and marries a wholly unsuitable neurotypical woman. He turns this situation into romantic comedy. For Eleanor Vincent, it wasn’t so funny. She met her third husband, computer scientist Lars (a pseudonym), through Zydeco dancing when she was in her sixties. Though aware that he could be unemotional and act strangely, she found him chivalrous and sweet. They dated for a time but he hurt and confused her by asking for his apartment keys back. After a five-year period she calls their “Interregnum,” the two got back together and married. Despite their years of friendship, she was completely unprepared for what living with him would be like. “At the age of seventy-one, I had married a stranger,” she writes.
It didn’t help that Covid hit partway through their four-year marriage, nor that they each received a cancer diagnosis (cervical vs. prostate). But the problems were more with their everyday differences in responses and processing. During their courtship, she ignored some bizarre things he did around her family: he bit her nine-year-old granddaughter as a warning of what would happen if she kept antagonizing their cat, and he put a gift bag over his head while they were at the dinner table with her siblings. These are a couple of the most egregious instances, but there are examples throughout of how Lars did things she didn’t understand. Through support groups and marriage counselling, she realized how well Lars had masked his autism when they were dating – and that he wasn’t willing to do the work required to make their marriage succeed. The book ends with them estranged but a divorce imminent.
If this were purely carping about a husband’s weirdness, it might have been tedious or depressing. But Vincent doesn’t blame Lars, and she incorporates so much else in this short memoir, including a number of topics that are of particular interest to me. There’s her PTSD from a traumatic upbringing, her parents’ identity as closeted gay people, the complications around her father’s death, the tragedy of her older daughter’s death, as well as the more everyday matters of being a working single parent, finding an affordable property in California’s Bay Area, and blending households.
Vincent crafts engaging scenes with solid recreated dialogue, and I especially liked the few meta chapters revealing “What I Left Out” – a memoir is always a shaped narrative, while life is messy; this shows both. She is also honest about her own failings and occasional bad behavior. I probably could have done with a little less detail on their sex life, however.
This had more relevance to me than expected. While my sister and I were clearing our mother’s belongings from the home she shared with her second husband for the 16 months between their wedding and her death, our stepsisters mentioned to us that they suspected their father was autistic. It was, as my sister said, a “lightbulb” moment, explaining so much about our respective parents’ relationship, and our interactions with him as well. My stepfather (who died just 10 months after my mother) was a dear man, but also maddening at times. A retired math professor, he was logical and flat of affect. Sometimes his humor was off-kilter and he made snap, unsentimental decisions that we couldn’t fathom. Had they gotten longer together, no doubt many of the issues Vincent experienced would have arisen. (Read via BookSirens)
[173 pages]
The Ocean
Playground by Richard Powers
&
Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell
The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski
Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson
While I was less than enraptured with its artificial intelligence theme and narrative trickery, I loved the content about the splendour of the ocean in Richard Powers’s Booker Prize-longlisted Playground. Most of this comes via Evelyne Beaulieu, a charismatic French Canadian marine biologist (based in part on Sylvia Earle) who is on the first all-female submarine mission and is still diving in the South Pacific in her nineties. Powers explicitly references Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Between that and the revelation of Evelyne as a late-bloomer lesbian, I was reminded of Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, a forthcoming novella-length academic study by Lida Maxwell that I have assessed for Foreword Reviews. Maxwell’s central argument is that Carson’s romantic love for a married woman, Dorothy Freeman, served as an awakening to wonder and connection and spurred her to write her greatest works.
After reading Playground, I decided to place a library hold on Blue Machine by Helen Czerski (winner of the Wainwright Writing on Conservation Prize this year), which Powers acknowledges as an inspiration that helped him to think bigger. I have also pulled my copy of Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson off the shelf as it’s high time I read more by her.
Previous book pairings posts: 2018 (Alzheimer’s, female friendship, drug addiction, Greenland and fine wine!) and 2023 (Hardy’s Wives, rituals and romcoms).
Richard Rohr at Greenbelt Festival (Online) & The Naked Now Review
Back in late August, I attended another online talk that really chimed with the one by Richard Holloway, this time as part of Greenbelt Festival, a progressive Christian event we used to attend annually but haven’t been to in many years now.
Not just as a Covid holdover but also in a conscious sustainability effort, Greenbelt hosted a “fly-free zone” where overseas speakers appeared on a large screen instead of travelling thousands of miles. So Richard Rohr, who appeared old and frail to me – no wonder, as he is now 81 and has survived five unrelated cancers (doctors literally want to do a genetic study on him) – appeared from the communal lounge of his Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico to introduce his upcoming book The Tears of Things, due in March 2025. The title is from the same Virgil quote as Holloway’s The Heart of Things. It’s about the Old Testament prophets’ shift from rage to lamentation to doxology (“the great nevertheless,” he called it): a psychological journey we all must make as part of becoming spiritually mature.
From reading his Falling Upward, I was familiar with Rohr’s central teaching of life being in two halves: the first, ego-led, is about identity and argumentation; the second is about transcending the self to tap into a universal consciousness. “It’s a terrible burden to carry your own judgementalism,” he declared. A God encounter provokes the transformation, and generally it comes through suffering, he said; you can’t take a shortcut. Anger is a mark of “incomplete” prophets such as John the Baptist, he explained. Rage might seem to empower, but it’s unrefined and only gives people permission to be nasty to others, he said. We can’t preach about a wrathful God or we will just produce wrathful people, he insisted; instead, we have to teach mercy.
When Rohr used to run rites of passage for young men, he would tell them that they weren’t actually angry, they were sad. There are tears that come from God, he said: for Gaza, for Ukraine. We know that Jesus wept at least twice, as recorded in scripture: once for Jerusalem (the collective) and once for his dead friend Lazarus (the individual). Doing the “grief work” is essential, he said. A parallel to that anger to sadness to praise trajectory is order to disorder to reorder, a paradigm he takes from the Bible’s wisdom literature. Brian McLaren’s recent work is heavily influenced by these ideas, too.
During the question time, Rohr was drawn out on the difference between Buddhism and Christianity (the latter gives reality a personal and benevolent face, he said) and how he understands hope – it is participation in the life of God, he said, and it certainly doesn’t come from looking at the data. He lauded Buddhism for its insistence on non-dualism or unitive consciousness, which he also interprets as the “mind of Christ.” The love of God is the Absolute, he said, and although he has experienced it throughout his life, he has known it especially when (as now) he was weak and poor.
Non-dualism is the theme that led me to go back to a book that had been on my bedside table, partly read, for months.
The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (2009)
This was my fourth book by Rohr, and as with The Universal Christ, I feel at a loss trying to express how wise and earth-shaking it is. The kernel of the argument is simple. Dualistic thinking is all or nothing, us and them. The mystical view of life involves nonduality; not knowing the right things but “knowing better” through contemplation. It’s an opening of the heart that then allows for a change of mind. And yes, as he said at Greenbelt, it mostly comes about through great suffering – or great love. Jesus embodies nonduality by being not human or divine, but both, as does God through the multiplicity of the Trinity.
The book completely upends the fundamentalist Christianity I grew up with. Its every precept is based on Bible quotes or Christian tradition. It’s only 160 pages long, very logical and readable; I only went through it so slowly because I had to mark out and reread brilliant passages every few pages.
You can tell adult and authentic faith by people’s ability to deal with darkness, failure, and nonvalidation of the ego—and by their quiet but confident joy!
[I’ve met people who are like this.]
If your religious practice is nothing more than to remain sincerely open to the ongoing challenges of life and love, you will find God — and also yourself.
[This reminded me of “God is change,” the doctrine in Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.]
If you can handle/ignore a bit of religion, I would recommend Rohr to readers of Brené Brown, Susan Cain (thinking of Bittersweet in particular) and Anne Lamott, among other self-help and spirituality authors – e.g., he references Eckhart Tolle. Rohr is also known for being one of the popularizers of the Enneagram, a personality tool similar to the Myers-Briggs test but which in its earliest form dates back to the Desert Father Evagrius Ponticus. 
Three “Love” or “Heart” Books for Valentine’s Day: Ephron, Lischer and Nin
Every year I say I’m really not a Valentine’s Day person and yet put together a themed post featuring books that have “Love” or a similar word in the title. This is the eighth year in a row, in fact (after 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023)! Today I’m looking at two classic novellas, one of them a reread and the other my first taste of a writer I’d expected more from; and a wrenching, theologically oriented bereavement memoir.
Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983)
I’d already pulled this out for my planned reread of books published in my birth year, so it’s pleasing that it can do double duty here. I can’t say it better than my original 2013 review:
The funniest book you’ll ever read about heartbreak and betrayal, this is full of wry observations about the compromises we make to marry – and then stay married to – people who are very different from us. Ephron readily admitted that her novel is more than a little autobiographical: it’s based on the breakdown of her second marriage to investigative journalist Carl Bernstein (All the President’s Men), who had an affair with a ludicrously tall woman – one element she transferred directly into Heartburn.
Ephron’s fictional counterpart is Rachel Samstad, a New Yorker who writes cookbooks or, rather, memoirs with recipes – before that genre really took off. Seven months pregnant with her second child, she has just learned that her second husband is having an affair. What follows is her uproarious memories of life, love and failed marriages. Indeed, as Ephron reflected in a 2004 introduction, “One of the things I’m proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy – and if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is.”
As one might expect from a screenwriter, there is a cinematic – that is, vivid but not-quite-believable – quality to some of the moments: the armed robbery of Rachel’s therapy group, her accidentally flinging an onion into the audience during a cooking demonstration, her triumphant throw of a key lime pie into her husband’s face in the final scene. And yet Ephron was again drawing on experience: a friend’s therapy group was robbed at gunpoint, and she’d always filed the experience away in a mental drawer marked “Use This Someday” – “My mother taught me many things when I was growing up, but the main thing I learned from her is that everything is copy.” This is one of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson’s favorite books ever, for its mixture of recipes and rue, comfort food and folly. It’s a quick read, but a substantial feast for the emotions.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother when I can’t improve on reviews I wrote over a decade ago (see also another upcoming reread). What I would add now, without disputing any of the above, is that there’s more bitterness to the tone than I’d recalled, even though Ephron does, yes, play it for laughs. But also, some of the humour hasn’t aged well, especially where based on race/culture or sexuality. I’d forgotten that Rachel’s husband isn’t the only cheater here; pretty much every couple mentioned is currently working through the aftermath of an affair or has survived one in the past. In one of these, the wife who left for a woman is described not as a lesbian but by another word, each time, which felt unkind rather than funny.
Still, the dialogue, the scenes, the snarky self-portrayal: it all pops. This was autofiction before that was a thing, but anyone working in any genre could learn how to write readable content by studying Ephron. “‘I don’t have to make everything into a joke,’ I said. ‘I have to make everything into a story.’ … I think you often have that sense when you write – that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you’re free of it. And you’re not, of course; you’ve just managed to set it down on paper, that’s all.” (Little Free Library)
My original rating (2013): 
My rating now:
Stations of the Heart: Parting with a Son by Richard Lischer (2013)
“What we had taken to be a temporary unpleasantness had now burrowed deep into the family pulp and was gnawing us from the inside out.” Like all life writing, the bereavement memoir has two tasks: to bear witness and to make meaning. From a distance that just happens to be Mary Karr’s prescribed seven years, Lischer opens by looking back on the day when his 33-year-old son Adam called to tell him that his melanoma, successfully treated the year before, was back. Tests revealed that the cancer’s metastases were everywhere, including in his brain, and were “innumerable,” a word that haunted Lischer and his wife, their daughter, and Adam’s wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
The next few months were a Calvary of sorts, and Lischer, an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School, draws deliberate parallels with the biblical and liturgical preparations for Good Friday that feel appropriate for this Ash Wednesday. Lischer had no problem with Adam’s late-life conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism, whose rites he followed with great piety in his final summer. He traces Adam and Jenny’s daily routines as well as his own helpless attendance at hospital appointments. Doped up on painkillers, Adam attended one last Father’s Day baseball game with him; one last Fourth of July picnic. Everyone so desperately wanted him to keep going long enough to meet his baby girl. To think that she is now a young woman and has opened all the presents Adam bought to leave behind for her first 18 birthdays.
The facts of the story are heartbreaking enough, but Lischer’s prose is a perfect match: stately, resolute and weighted with spiritual allusion, yet never morose. He approaches the documenting of his son’s too-short life with a sense of sacred duty: “I have acquired a new responsibility: I have become the interpreter of his death. God, I must do a better job. … I kissed his head and thanked him for being my son. I promised him then that his death would not ruin my life.” This memoir brought back so much about my brother-in-law’s death from brain cancer in 2015, from the “TEAM [ADAM/GARNET]” T-shirts to Adam’s sister’s remark, “I never dreamed this would be our family’s story.” We’re not alone. (Remainder book from the Bowie, Maryland Dollar Tree) 
A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin (1954)
I’d heard Nin spoken of in the same breath as D.H. Lawrence, so thought I might similarly appreciate her because of, or despite, comically overblown symbolism around sex. I think I was also expecting something more titillating? (I guess I had this confused for Delta of Venus, her only work that would be shelved in an Erotica section.) Many have tried to make a feminist case for this novella about Sabina, an early liberated woman in New York City who has extramarital sex with four other men who appeal to her for various not particularly good reasons (the traumatized soldier whom she comforts like a mother; the exotic African drummer – “Sabina did not feel guilty for drinking of the tropics through Mambo’s body”). She herself states, “I want to trespass boundaries, erase all identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mould, one place without hope of change.” The most interesting aspect of the book was Sabina’s questioning of whether she inherited her promiscuity from her father (it’s tempting to read this autobiographically as Nin’s own father left the family for another woman, a foundational wound in her life).
Come on, though, “fecundated,” “fecundation” … who could take such vocabulary seriously? Or this sex writing (snort!): “only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on a man’s sensual mast.” I charge you to use the term “sensual mast” wherever possible in the future. (Secondhand – Oxfam, Newbury) 
But hey, check out my score for the Faber Valentine’s quiz!
Reading the Rathbones Folio Prize Poetry Shortlist
I borrowed the whole of this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize poetry shortlist from my local library and have enjoyed reading through it to see what the judges felt was worthy of recognition from 2022’s releases. Of course, personal taste comes into the appreciation of poetry, perhaps more so than for fiction or nonfiction, so I liked some of these more than others and suspect the judges’ final decision may differ from mine. Still, it’s always a pleasure to discover new-to-me poets and/or debut authors.
Ephemeron by Fiona Benson
This is Benson’s third collection but my first time reading her. I was fully engaged with her exquisite poems about the ephemeral, whether that be insect lives, boarding school days, primal emotions or moments from her children’s early years. The book is in four discrete corresponding sections (“Insect Love Songs,” “Boarding-School Tales,” “Translations from the Pasiphaë” and “Daughter Mother”) but the themes and language bleed from one into another and the whole is shot through with astonishing corporeality and eroticism.
The form varies quite a lot – bitty lines, stanzas, blocky paragraph-like stories – and alliteration, slant rhymes and unexpected metaphors (a wasp’s nest as “a piñata of stings,” “this avant-garde chandelier” and an “electric hotel / of spit-balled papier mâché”) make each poem glisten. I’ll even let her off for the long section inspired by my pet hate, Greek mythology (so gruesome, so convoluted), because of how she uses these melodramatic situations to explore universal emotions. She does something interesting with the story of the Minotaur (Asterios), suggesting that instead of being born a literal bull he was born deformed or disabled and no one knew what to make of him, but even so he had a mother’s love.
Here’s one section of “Magicicadas” as an example:
Warm rain
summons them up
through loam
like Lazarus
after seventeen years,
cases splitting
down their backs
emerging
like the wet head
of a baby,
wrestling out
of their tight old skin
arching back
like an orgasm,
like an ecstatic gymnast
on the high trapeze;
sap-green, bunker-pale,
their damp wings lemon
before they stiffen
and straighten, lattice brown.
Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Protest doesn’t have to be loud; sometimes it can even be silent. In her debut, Bulley, a British-born Ghanaian poet, makes that especially clear with the pair “[ ] noise” (= white noise, inescapable) and “black noise” (an erasure poem). She models how language might be decolonized (particularly in “revision”) and how Black femininity might be reimagined (“fabula”). Along with her acknowledged debts to Lucille Clifton, bell hooks, Mary Oliver et al., I spotted echoes of Kei Miller (her “there is dark that moves” sounds like his “there is an anger that moves”) and Toni Morrison (Bulley includes the line “Quiet as it’s kept,” which is the opening of The Bluest Eye).
The collection is bold but never heavy-handed, and the seriousness of its topics (also including an early miscarriage) is lightened by poems about cats and snails. My two favourites were “not quiet as in quiet but,” which juxtaposes peacefulness and the comfortable life with the perils of not speaking out about injustice; and “Epigenetic,” about generations of traumatized bodies (“if your pain is alive in me / so too must be your joy.”).
Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Kinshasa is also a dancer, and in her debut the British-born Barbadian intersperses poems with choreographed dances, transcribed via hand-drawn symbols explained in a key at the end. I confess I couldn’t picture them at all, though they make attractive patterns on the page – you can see one in purple on the cover. This and the Caribbean patois in which she voices narratives of historical atrocities and contemporary microaggressions against Black people (particularly women) are the collection’s claims to novelty and probably impressed the judges. Yet I found both strategies to be affected and looked forward to those poems in standard language. Some of the events are given specific dates and places in Barbados while others are more generic. Female victims of sexual oppression seek revenge, as in the gruesome “Miss Barbados Is No Longer Vegan.” This probably works best aloud, to allow one to appreciate the musicality of the voice and the alliterative lines. 
Some lines I liked:
we gambled all our wishes on dandelions,
now we celebrate de little tings
every unburnt rice grain & regrown eyelash
vaulting between lemon vines and dog friendly cafés.
just because we do what needs to be done,
it doan mean we nah ready, we just aware
there are too many of us to be martyrs
(from “Sometimes Death Is a Child Who Plays With Rubber Bands”)
The work is dangerous; writing into history is like feeding unknown seeds while attempting to control the rate of their growth. Sometimes when I danced, I inhaled the language of my ancestors’ captors, and they became mine.
(from “Preface: And if by Some Miracle”)
if you want something to become extinct
doan give it attention.
(from “Choreography: She, My Nation”)
England’s Green by Zaffar Kunial
A collection in praise of the country’s natural and cultural heritage, with poems about hedgerows and butterflies; cricket and the writings of the Brontë sisters. There are autobiographical reminiscences as well, most notably “The Crucible,” which describes the meeting between his Kashmiri father and his English mother’s father, who had refused to acknowledge the relationship for its first three years.
Kunial clearly delights in language, with wordplay and differing pronunciations fuelling “Foregrounds” et al. I particularly liked “Foxgloves” (“Sometimes I like to hide in the word / foxgloves – in the middle of foxgloves. The xgl is hard to say”) and “The Wind in the Willows,” where he wonders if the book title appeals to him just for its sound. This wasn’t as immediately cohesive and impressive as his first book, Us, but still well worth reading. 
Some favourite lines:
“Prayer is not the words / but having none and staying” (from “Empty Words”)
“Life // is wider than its page. And days are a cut field, clipped and made to run on” (from “The Groundsman”)
Manorism by Yomi Sode
Like Surge or Poor (or what little I read of Citizen), this is driven by outrage and a longing for justice for Black people. I suspect that, like those precursors, it is a book best heard in performance, given that Sode honed his skills on London’s open mic circuit.
The first third of the book is under the heading “Aneephya,” a word Sode coined and defines as “the stress toxin of inherited trauma” – from slave ships to police checks. My two favourites were from this section: “L’Appel du Vide,” in which he ponders microaggressions while cooking a traditional West African mackerel and okra stew; and “A Plate of Artichokes,” about the time a waiter made him pre-pay for his meal and he went along with it even though he suspected other customers weren’t being asked to do the same.
Nigerian culture, rap music, being a father, and Black brotherhood are other themes, with recurring allusions to the work of Caravaggio. I also liked the long section on the decline and death of his great-aunt (“Big Mummy”) from cancer.
This was a book that made me feel super-white, but that’s not a problem: I can recognize its importance and appeal while also accepting that it’s not necessarily supposed to be for me. 
Which of these poetry collections interest you?
Six Degrees of Separation: From Beach Read to Mandy
I’m getting back into my favourite regular meme after a couple of months off. This time we begin with Beach Read by Emily Henry – though it’s midwinter here in the UK, it’s beach season for Kate in Australia! (See her opening post.)
#1 I’m no beach bunny; we prefer to explore rocky seabird coasts. The last time I remember sitting under an umbrella on a sandy beach, my choice of reading material was When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (reread when it was on the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist).
#2 Kalanithi was a neurosurgery resident who was unexpectedly diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at age 36. My latest cancer-themed read was the excellent autobiographical novel Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić.
#3 I first learned about the Japanese practice of kintsugi – filling cracks, such as in pottery, with liquid gold to accentuate rather than hide the imperfections – from A Manual for Heartache by Cathy Rentzenbrink (you can see it in the cover design), a slim and reassuring self-help book that’s shelved under YA at my library.
#4 Cathy Rentzenbrink blurbs nearly every new release out there, but rather than a recommendation for a shiny book I got from her I have in mind that she’s a fellow evangelist for a favourite older novel of mine, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively.
#5 Thinking of other Penelopes I’ve read, I learned about an appealing upcoming reissue, The Home by Penelope Mortimer (1971), thanks to British Library Women Writers series consultant and classics champion Simon Thomas of Stuck in a Book (his review is here). It sounds like a sort-of sequel to The Pumpkin Eater, which I loved.
#6 I looked through a Goodreads list of other 1971 releases to inspire this final link. A number of them are on my TBR, but there are only a few that I’ve read. One of those is a children’s book I had completely forgotten about until now, though I owned a copy way back when: Mandy by Julie Andrews Edwards, about an orphan who finds an abandoned cottage in the woods and makes it her own. YES, it’s by that Julie Andrews, and it sounds like a perfect follow-up for anyone who’s read The Secret Garden.
Where will your chain take you? Join us for #6Degrees of Separation! (Hosted on the first Saturday of each month by Kate W. of Books Are My Favourite and Best.) Next month’s starting book is Trust by Hernan Diaz.
Have you read any of my selections? Tempted by any you didn’t know before?
Best Books from 2022
I’m keeping it simple this year with one post covering a baker’s dozen from all genres: the 13 current-year releases that stood out to me the most. (No rankings this time; anything from my Best of First Half post that didn’t make it through to here can be considered a runner-up.)
Fiction
Groundskeeping by Lee Cole: In Cole’s debut novel, two aspiring writers meet on a Kentucky college campus and form a romantic connection despite very different backgrounds. There are stereotypes to be overcome as Owen introduces Alma to Kentucky culture and slang. Trump’s election divides families and colleagues. The gentle satire on the pretensions of writing programs is another enjoyable element. Three-dimensional characters, vivid scenes ripe for the Netflix treatment, timely themes and touching relationships.
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana: Fofana’s novel-in-stories orbits a Harlem apartment complex and spins bittersweet tales of ambition and disappointment in a range of vibrant voices. Endearing scoundrels are the focus in a number of stories. Minor characters from some go on to have starring roles in others. Though these tenants’ lives are filled with difficulties, their optimism and sheer joy shine through in their picaresque antics. A stellar debut from a very talented writer; Fofana should win all the prizes.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel: This dazzlingly intricate novel blends historical fiction, up-to-the-minute commentary and science-fiction predictions. In 2401, the Time Institute hires Gaspery-Jacques Roberts to investigate a recurring blip in time. Fans of The Glass Hotel will recognize some characters, and those familiar with Station Eleven will find similarities in a pandemic plot that resonates with the Covid-19 experience. How does Mandel do it? One compulsively readable hit after another.
Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso: The aphoristic style of some of Manguso’s previous books continues here as discrete paragraphs and brief vignettes build to a gloomy portrait of Ruthie’s archetypical affection-starved childhood in the fictional Massachusetts town of Waitsfield in the 1980s and 90s. The depiction of Ruthie’s narcissistic mother is especially acute. So much resonated with me. This is the stuff of girlhood – if not universally, then certainly for the (largely pre-tech) American 1990s as I experienced them.
Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić: This intense work of autofiction is all the more powerful due to the second-person narration that displaces the pain of breast cancer from the protagonist and onto the reader. Coming of age in a female body was traumatic in itself; now that same body threatens to kill her. Even as she loses the physical signs of femininity, she remains resilient: Her body will document what she’s been through. As forthright as it is about the brutality of cancer treatment, the novella is also creative, playful and darkly comic.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken: Is it autofiction or bereavement memoir? Both and neither. In 2019, an American writer wanders London, seeing the sights but mostly reminiscing about her mother, whom she describes through bare facts and apt anecdotes. London had been a favourite destination, their final trip together falling just three years before. As well as a tribute to a beloved mother and a matter-of-fact record of dealing with ageing parents and the aftermath of loss, this is a playful cross-examination of literary genres.
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka: Otsuka’s third novel of the Japanese American experience again employs the first-person plural, as well as the second person – rarer perspectives that provide stylistic novelty. The first two chapters are set at a pool that, for the title swimmers, serves as a locus of escape and safety. On the first page we’re introduced to Alice, whose struggle with dementia becomes central. I admired Otsuka’s techniques for moving readers through the minds of the characters, alternating range with profundity and irony with sadness.
Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong: Wong’s dynamite debut novel weaves timely issues of racism and protest into a pacy, funny story of idealism versus cynicism. Reed, an Asian American college student committed to social justice, rethinks how best to live out his values in the real world when he goes home for a few days. Wong probes the generational gap between him and his parents through snappy dialogue and enjoyable scenes that constitute an incidental tour of multi-ethnic Los Angeles.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: Sam and Sadie’s friendship, which over the years becomes a business partnership that also incorporates Sam’s college roommate, Marx Watanabe, is a joy. Their creative energy and banter are enviable. Marx is the uncomplicated, optimistic go-between when Sam and Sadie butt heads and take offense at betrayals. Underneath their conflicts is a love different from, and maybe superior to, romantic love. An immersive story of friendship and obsession; nostalgic, even cathartic.
Nonfiction
In Love by Amy Bloom: Bloom’s husband, Brian Ameche, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in his mid-60s, having exhibited mild cognitive impairment for several years. Brian quickly resolved to make a dignified exit while he still, mostly, had his faculties. This achieves the perfect tone, mixing black humour with teeth-gritted practicality as Bloom chronicles their relationship, the final preparations, his assisted suicide at Dignitas in Switzerland, and the aftermath. An essential, compelling read.
Sinkhole: A Natural History of a Suicide by Juliet Patterson: This gorgeously written family memoir approaches its subject matter with brave tenderness. In December 2008, poet Patterson’s father died by suicide near his Minnesota home. He wasn’t an obvious risk. Yet there was family history: both of Patterson’s parents lost their fathers to suicide. She returns to Kansas on research trips to unearth her grandfathers’ lives. Throughout, sinkholes, common in Kansas, are both reality and metaphor for the chasm a suicide leaves.
Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion by Louise Willder: A delightful bibliophile’s miscellany about ways of pithily spreading excitement about books. Over the last 25 years, Willder has written jacket copy for thousands of Penguin releases, so she has it down to a science as well as an art. (Reviewing is an adjacent skill.) The art of the first line, serialization and self-promotion, guidelines for good writing, differences between British and American jacket copy, the use of punctuation, and so much more. Very funny to boot.
Poetry
Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble by Carolyn Oliver: Carolyn used to blog at Rosemary and Reading Glasses and won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize for this debut collection. Every line feels tirelessly honed to elicit maximal meaning and a memorable sound. Traditional forms are adapted to great effect. Chronic illness, gardening, and everyday sexual danger are themes, but the poems that pierced me most were about her son: quirky things he says, but also the reality of modern parenting, where active shooter drills are de rigueur.
This year’s best-of selections (the ones I own in print, anyway; the rest were read on Kindle or have already gone back to the library).
Have you read any of my 2022 favourites?
What releases do I need to catch up on right away?
For Thy Great Pain… and Ti Amo for #NovNov22
On Friday evening we went to see Aqualung give his first London show in 12 years. (Here’s his lovely new song “November.”) I like travel days because I tend to get loads of reading done on my Kindle, and this was no exception: I read both of the below novellas, plus two-thirds of a poetry collection. Novellas aren’t always quick reads, but these were.
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie (2023)
Two female medieval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are the twin protagonists of Mackenzie’s debut. She allows each to tell her life story through alternating first-person strands that only braid together very late on when she posits that Margery visited Julian in her cell and took into safekeeping the manuscript of her “shewings.” I finished reading Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love earlier this year and, apart from a couple of biographical details (she lost her husband and baby daughter to an outbreak of plague, and didn’t leave her cell in Norwich for 23 years), this added little to my experience of her work.
I didn’t know Margery’s story, so found her sections a little more interesting. A married mother of 14, she earned scorn for preaching, prophesying and weeping in public. Again and again, she was told to know her place and not dare to speak on behalf of God or question the clergy. She was a bold and passionate woman, and the accusations of heresy were no doubt motivated by a wish to see her humiliated for claiming spiritual authority. But nowadays, we would doubtless question her mental health – likewise for Julian when you learn that her shewings arose from a time of fevered hallucination. If you’re new to these figures, you might be captivated by their bizarre life stories and religious obsession, but I thought the bare telling was somewhat lacking in literary interest. (Read via NetGalley) [176 pages] 
Coming out on January 19th from Bloomsbury.
Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik (2020; 2022)
[Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken; Archipelago Books]
Ørstavik wrote this in the early months of 2020 while she was living in Milan with her husband, Luigi Spagnol, who was her Italian publisher as well as a painter. They had only been together for four years and he’d been ill for half of that. The average life expectancy for someone who had undergone his particular type of pancreatic cancer surgery was 15–20 months; “We’re at fifteen months now.” Indeed, Spagnol would die in June 2020. But Ørstavik writes from that delicate in-between time when the outcome is clear but hasn’t yet arrived:
What’s real is that you’re still here, and at the same time, as if embedded in that, the fact that soon you’re going to die. Often I don’t feel a thing.
She knows, having heard it straight from his doctor’s lips, that her husband is going to die in a matter of months, but he doesn’t know. And now he wants to host a New Year’s Eve party, as is their annual tradition. Ørstavik skips between the present, the couple’s shared past, and an incident from her recent past that she hasn’t yet told anyone else: not long ago, while in Mexico for a literary festival, she fell in love with A., her handler. And while she hasn’t acted on that, beyond a kiss on the cheek, it’s smouldering inside her, a secret from the husband she still loves and can’t bear to hurt. Novels are where she can be most truthful, and she knows the one she needs to write will be healing.
There are many wrenching scenes and moments here, but it’s all delivered in a fairly flat style that left little impression on me. I wonder if I’d appreciate her fiction more. (Read via Edelweiss) [124 pages]
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 