Best Books of 2024: My Top 20
I’m keeping it simple again this year with one post covering all genres: these are the 20 current-year releases that stood out the most for me. (No rankings.) Those that aren’t repeated from my Best Books from the First Half of 2024 post didn’t quite make the cut but should be considered as runners-up well worth your time. Unsurprisingly, health is a common theme across many of my selections, especially as it touches women’s lives. Pictured below are the books I read in print; the others were all electronic copies. Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down: The Graphic Novel by Sarah Airriess: The thrilling opening to a cinematically vivid adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir. He was an assistant zoologist on Robert Falcon Scott’s perilous 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. The book resembles a full-color storyboard for a Disney-style maritime adventure film. There is jolly camaraderie as the men sing sea shanties to boost morale. The next volume can’t arrive soon enough.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: This nuanced debut alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and time travel sci-fi, making clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress. The narrator is a “bridge” helping to resettle a Victorian polar explorer in near-future London. You just have to suspend disbelief and go with it. Bradley’s descriptive prose is memorable but never quirky for the sake of it. I haven’t had so much fun with a book since Romantic Comedy. A witty, sexy, off-kilter gem.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj: Darraj’s novel-in-stories is a shimmering composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. Each of the stories (four in the first person, five in the third person) spotlights a particular character. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s.
Clear by Carys Davies: Depicts the Highland Clearances in microcosm though Ivar, last resident of a remote Scottish island between Shetland and Norway. John is a minister sent by the landowner to remove Ivar. Mary, John’s wife, journeys from the mainland to rescue him. Davies writes striking scenes that bring the island scenery to life. Her deceptively simple prose captures the slow building of emotion and moments that change everything. For a trio that seemed on course for tragedy, there is the grace of a happier ending.
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell: A poet and academic (who both is and is not Greenwell) endures a Covid-era medical crisis that takes him to the brink of mortality and the boundary of survivable pain. Over two weeks, we become intimately acquainted with his every test, intervention, setback and fear. Experience is clarified precisely into fluent language that also flies far above a hospital bed, into a vibrant past, a poetic sensibility, a hoped-for normality. I’ve never read so remarkable an account of what it is to be a mind in a fragile body.
Wellness by Nathan Hill: A state-of-the-nation story filtered through one Chicago family experiencing midlife and marital crises: underperforming academic Jack; his wife Elizabeth, a placebo researcher at Wellness; and their YouTube-obsessed son Toby. They’ve recently invested their life savings in a new condo. The addictive and spot-on novel asks questions about authenticity, purpose, and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? Hill is clearly fascinated with psychological experimentation but also questions it to humorous effect.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: Twenty- and thirtysomethings having lots of sex, yes, but now a solemn tone: Characters’ suffering and failures have deepened their thinking, sense of self, and ability to feel for others. Peter and Ivan lost their father to cancer; Sylvia is in chronic pain after an accident; Naomi is evicted and aimless; Margaret is ashamed of having an estranged alcoholic husband. Chess is a clever metaphor for their interactions; the depiction of grief rings true. A stylistic leap forward, too. Her best, most mature work by a mile.
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck: A dozen stories form a “hook-and-chain” formation of five couplets, bookended by a first and last story related to each other. Links are satisfyingly overt: A pair takes place in the same New England house in different centuries; a companion piece fills in the history of the characters from the previous. All are historically convincing, and the very human themes of lust, parenthood, sorrow and frustrated ambition resonate across centuries and state lines. Really beautiful (and better than North Woods).
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang (illus. LeUyen Pham): A super-cute teen graphic novel with gorgeous illustrations prioritizing pink and red to suit the theme. We follow Vietnamese American Valentina through high school as she plays host to an internal debate between cynicism and romanticism. Ever since her mother left, she’s longed to believe in romance but feared that love is a doomed prospect for her family. The Asian community of Oakland, California and a new hobby of lion dancing provide engrossing cultural detail.
Nonfiction
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s Manhattan apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell. Throughout, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell’s death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti: Heti put 10 years of diary contents into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence, and then ruthlessly culled the results. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of her oeuvre: obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity, but also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding chronology. Amazingly, the collage approach produces a genuine, crystalline vision of the self. A sui generis work of life writing.
Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom by Pam Houston: If you’re going to read a polemic, make sure it’s as elegantly written and expertly argued as this one. Houston responds to the overturning of Roe v. Wade with 60 micro-essays – one for each full year of her life – about what it means to be in a female body in a country that seeks to control and systematically devalue women. The cycling of topics makes for an exquisite structure. Houston is among my recommendations for top-notch authors you might not know.
The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain by Nina Lohman: Chronic Daily Headaches: Having a clinical term for extreme pain did nothing to solve it; no treatment Lohman has tried over a decade has helped much either. Medical professionals and friends alike downplay her experience because she is able to pass as well and raise two children. The fragmentary pieces read like poems. Bodily realities defy language, yet she employs words exquisitely. The tone flows from enraged to resigned to cynical and back.
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie: This impassioned auto/biographical collage combines the strengths of oral history, group biography and a fragmented memoir. “Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key. As readers, we watch her life, her thinking and the book all take shape. It’s warm and empathetic, with layers of stories that reflect diversity of experience.
A Termination by Honor Moore: A fascinatingly discursive memoir that circles a 1969 abortion and contrasts societal mores across her lifetime. Moore was a 23-year-old drama student; the termination was “my first autonomous decision,” she insists, a way of saying, “I want this life, not that life.” Family and social factors put her life into perspective. The concise text is composed of crystalline fragments, incorporating occasional second- and third-person narration. The kaleidoscopic yet fluid approach is stunning.
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss: Moss effectively contrasts the would-be happily ever after of generally getting better after eight years of disordered eating with her anorexia returning with a vengeance at age 46. The mood shifts so that what threatens to be slightly cloying in the childhood section turns academically curious and then, somehow, despite distancing pronouns (mostly second- but also some third-person narration), intimate. Shape-shifting, devastating, staunchly pragmatic; a unique model for converting life into art.
Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie: I’ve not had much success with Rushdie’s fiction, but this is excellent, with intriguing side tendrils and many quotable lines. It traces lead-up and aftermath; unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some medical detail about his recovery, you get the sense of him more as an unchanging mind and a resolute will. The most noteworthy section imagines dialogues he might have with the imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations.
Poetry
Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor: Factor’s long, intricate poetry collection showcases the tension between past and present and envisions womanhood as a tug of war between desire and constraint. “Elegy for a Younger Self” poems string together vivid reminiscences. In “Sapphics on Nursing” and elsewhere, romantic friendships edge toward homoeroticism; heterosexual marriage and motherhood represent either delightful intimacy or a snare. Allusion and experience, slant rhymes and wordplay craft a lavish tapestry.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez: This debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming, tornadoes and cicadas. But her Kansas isn’t all rose-tinted nostalgia; there’s an edge of sadness and danger. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. In “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator becomes sinister. She also takes inspiration from headlines. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for.
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick: Motherhood and the body are overarching themes. The speaker has multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own, while another long section is about her husband’s transition. Bird metaphors are inescapable. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is dark humour and one-line rejoinders. If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further.
If I had to choose just one of each? This trio trying out complementary strategies for transmuting life into literature: Small Rain, Alphabetical Diaries and Egg/Shell.
Have you read any of these? Or might you now, based on my recommendation?
My Year in Novellas (#NovNov24)
Here at the start of the month, we’re inviting you to tell us about the novellas you’ve read since last November.
I have a special shelf of short books that I add to throughout the year. When at secondhand bookshops, charity shops, a Little Free Library, or the public library where I volunteer, I’m always thinking about my piles for November. But I do read novellas at other times of year, too. Forty-four of them between December 2023 and now, according to my Goodreads shelves (last year it was 46, so it seems like that’s par for the course). I often choose to review books of novella length for BookBrowse, Foreword and Shelf Awareness. I’ve read a real mixture, but predominantly literature in translation and autobiographical works.
My favourites of the ones I’ve already covered on the blog would probably be (nonfiction) Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti and (fiction) Aimez-vous Brahms by Françoise Sagan. My proudest achievements are: reading the short graphic novel Broderies by Marjane Satrapi in the original French at our Parisian Airbnb in December; and managing two rereads: Heartburn by Nora Ephron and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
Of the short books I haven’t already reviewed here, I’ve chosen two gems, one fiction and one nonfiction, to spotlight in this post:
Fiction
Clear by Carys Davies
Clear depicts the Highland Clearances in microcosm though the experiences of one man, Ivar, the last resident of a remote Scottish island between Shetland and Norway. As in a play, there is a limited setting and cast. John is a minister sent by the landowner to remove Ivar, but an accident soon after his arrival leaves him beholden to Ivar for food and care. Mary, John’s wife, is concerned and sets off on the long journey from the mainland to rescue him. Davies writes vivid scenes and brings the island’s scenery to life. Flashbacks fill in the personal and cultural history, often via objects. The Norn language is another point of interest. The deceptively simple prose captures both the slow building of emotion and the moments that change everything. It seemed the trio were on course for tragedy, yet they are offered the grace of a happier ending.
In my book club, opinions differed slightly as to the central relationship and the conclusion, but we agreed that it was beautifully done, with so much conveyed in the concise length. This received our highest rating ever, in fact. I’d read Davies’ West and not appreciated it as much, although looking back I can see that it was very similar: one or a few character(s) embarked on unusual and intense journey(s); a plucky female character; a heavy sense of threat; and an improbably happy ending. It was the ending that seemed to come out of nowhere and wasn’t in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novella that made me mark West down. Here I found the writing cinematic and particularly enjoyed Mary as a strong character who escaped spinsterhood but even in marriage blazes her own trail and is clever and creative enough to imagine a new living situation. And although the ending is sudden and surprising, it nevertheless seems to arise naturally from what we know of the characters’ emotional development – but also sent me scurrying back to check whether there had been hints. One of my books of the year for sure. 
Nonfiction
A Termination by Honor Moore
Poet and memoirist Honor Moore’s A Termination is a fascinatingly discursive memoir that circles her 1969 abortion and contrasts societal mores across her lifetime.
During the spring in question, Moore was a 23-year-old drama school student. Her lover, L, was her professor. But she also had unwanted sex with a photographer. She did not know which man had impregnated her, but she did know she didn’t feel prepared to become a mother. She convinced a psychiatrist that doing so would destroy her mental health, and he referred her to an obstetrician for a hospital procedure. The termination was “my first autonomous decision,” Moore insists, a way of saying, “I want this life, not that life.”
Family and social factors put Moore’s experiences into perspective. The first doctor she saw refused Moore’s contraception request because she was unmarried. Her mother, however, bore nine children and declined to abort a pregnancy when advised to do so for medical reasons. Moore observes that she made her own decision almost 10 years before “the word choice replaced pro abortion.”
This concise work is composed of crystalline fragments. The stream of consciousness moves back and forth in time, incorporating occasional second- and third-person narration as well as highbrow art and literature references. Moore writes one scene as if it’s in a play and imagines alternative scenarios in which she has a son; though she is curious, she is not remorseful. The granular attention to women’s lives recalls Annie Ernaux, while the kaleidoscopic yet fluid approach is reminiscent of Sigrid Nunez’s work. It’s a stunning rendering of steps on her childfree path. 
Reprinted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
I currently have four novellas underway and plan to start some more this weekend. I have plenty to choose from!
Everyone’s getting in on the act: there’s an article on ‘short and sweet books’ in the November/December issue of Bookmarks magazine, for which I’m an associate editor; Goodreads sent around their usual e-mail linking to a list of 100 books under 250 or 200 pages to help readers meet their 2024 goal. Or maybe you’d like to join in with Wafer Thin Books’ November buddy read, the Ugandan novella Waiting by Goretti Kyomuhendo (2007).
Why not share some recent favourite novellas with us in a post of your own?
Recent Poetry Releases by Anderson, Godden, Gomez, Goodan, Lewis & O’Malley
Nature, social engagement, and/or women’s stories are linking themes across these poetry collections, much as they vary in their particulars. After my brief thoughts, I offer one sample poem from each book.
And I Will Make of You a Vowel Sound by Morag Anderson
Morag Anderson was the 2023 Makar of the Federation of Writers in Scotland. She won the Aryamati Pamphlet Prize for this second chapbook of 25 poems. Her subjects are ordinary people: abandoned children, a young woman on a council estate, construction workers, and a shoplifter who can’t afford period products. The verse is rich with alliteration, internal rhymes and neologisms. Although sub/urban settings predominate, there are also poems dedicated to birds and to tracking the seasons’ march along a river. There is much sibilance to “Little Wren,” while “Cormorant Speaks” enchants with its fresh compound words: “Barefoot in mudslick streambeds I pathpick over rotsoft limbs, wade neckdeep in suncold loch”. “No Ordinary Tuesday, 2001” is about 9/11 and “None of the Nine Were There” expresses feminist indignation at the repeal of Roe v. Wade: “all nine were busy / stitching rules into the seams / of bleeding wombs.” A trio of poems depicts the transformation of matrescence: “Long after my shelterbody shucks / her reluctant skull / from my shell, // her foetal cells— / rosefoamed in my core— / migrate to mend my flensed heart.” Impassioned and superbly articulated. A confident poet whose work I was glad to discover.
With thanks to Fly on the Wall Press for the free copy for review.
With Love, Grief and Fury by Salena Godden
“In a time of apathy, / hope is a revolutionary act”. I knew Godden from her hybrid novel Mrs Death Misses Death, but this was my first taste of the poetry for which she is better known. The title gives a flavour of the variety in tone. Poems arise from environmental anxiety; feminist outrage at discrimination and violence towards women; and personal experiences of bisexuality, being childfree (“Book Mother” and “Egg and Spoon Race”), and entering perimenopause (“Evergreen Tea”). Solidarity and protest are strategies for dispelling ignorance about all of the above. Godden also marks the rhythms of everyday life for a single artist, and advises taking delight in life’s small pleasures. The social justice angle made it a perfect book for me to read portions of on the Restore Nature Now march through London in June …
… and while volunteering as an election teller at a polling station last week. It contains 81 poems (many of them overlong prose ones), making for a much lengthier collection than I would usually pick up. The repetition, wordplay and run-on sentences are really meant more for performance than for reading on the page, but if you’re a fan of Hollie McNish or Kae Tempest, you’re likely to enjoy this, too.
An excerpt from “But First Make Tea”
(Read via NetGalley) Published in the UK by Canongate Press.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez
Nancy Miller Gomez’s debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming; tornadoes and cicadas. But her remembered Kansas is no site of rose-tinted nostalgia. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. A pet snake goes missing and she imagines it haunting her mother. In “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator turns sinister. “Mothering,” likewise, eschews the cosy for images of fierce protection. The poet documents the death of her children’s father and abides with a son enduring brain scans and a daughter in recovery from heroin addiction. She also takes ideas from the headlines, with poems about the Ukraine invasion and species extinction. There is a prison setting in two in a row – she has taught Santa Cruz County Jail poetry workshops. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for, and I love the cover (Owl Collage by Alexandra Gallagher) and frequent bird metaphors. This also appeared on my Best Books from the First Half of 2024 list. [My full review is on Goodreads.]
With thanks to publicist Sarah Cassavant (Nectar Literary) and YesYes Books for the e-copy for review.
In the Days that Followed by Kevin Goodan
These 41 poems, each limited to one stanza and one page, are named for their first lines, like hymns. With their old-fashioned lyricism and precise nature vocabulary, they are deeply rooted in place and animated by frequent rhetorical questions. Birds and fields, livestock and wildfires: Goodan marks where human interest and the natural world meet, or sometimes clash. He echoes Emily Dickinson (“After great patience, a small bird comes”) and also reminds me of Keith Taylor, whose upcoming collection I’ve reviewed for Shelf Awareness. The pages are rain-soaked and ghost-haunted, creating a slightly melancholy atmosphere. Unusual phrasing and alliteration stand out: “on the field / A fallow calm falls / Leaving the soil / To its feraling.” He’s a new name for me though this is his seventh collection; I’d happily read more. [After I read the book I looked at the blurb on Goodreads. I got … none of that from my reading, so be aware that it’s very subtle.]
With thanks to Alice James Books for the e-copy for review.
From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis
This nicely ties together many of the themes covered by the other collections I’ve discussed: science and nature imagery, ageing, and social justice pleas. But Lewis adds in another major topic: language itself, by way of etymology and translation. “Another Way of Saying It” gives the origin of all but incidental words in parentheses. The “Tales from Mesopotamia” are from a commissioned verse play she wrote and connect back to her 2014 collection Taking Mesopotamia, with its sequence inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh. There are also translations from the Arabic and a long section paraphrases the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which recalls the books of Ecclesiastes and Job with its self-help aphorisms. Other poems are inspired by a mastectomy, Julian of Norwich, Japanese phrases, and Arthurian legend. The title phrase comes from the Rubaiyat and refers to the creation of humanity from clay. There’s such variety of subject matter here, but always curiosity and loving attention.
“On Translation”
The trouble with translating, for me, is that
when I’ve finished, my own words won’t come;
like unloved step-children in a second marriage,
they hang back at table, knowing their place.
While their favoured siblings hold forth, take
centre stage, mine remain faint, out of ear-shot
like Miranda on her island shore before the boats
came near enough, signalling a lost language;
and always the boom of another surf – pounding,
subterranean, masculine, urgent – makes my words
dither and flit, become little and scattered
like flickering shoals caught up in the slipstream
of a whale, small as sand crabs at the bottom of a bucket,
harmless; transparent as zooplankton.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the e-copy for review.
The Shark Nursery by Mary O’Malley
This was my first time reading Irish poet Mary O’Malley. Nature looms large in her tenth collection, as in several of the other books I’ve reviewed here, with poems about flora and fauna. “Late Swallow” is a highlight (“your loops and dives leave ripples in the air, / a winged Matisse, painting with scissors”) and the title’s reference is to dogfish – what’s in a name, eh? The meticulous detail in her descriptions made me think of still lifes, as did a mention of an odalisque. Other verse is stimulated by Greek myth, travel to Lisbon, and the Gaelic language. Sections are devoted to pandemic experiences (“Another Plague Season”) and to technology. “The Dig” imagines what future archaeologists will make of our media. I noted end and internal rhymes in “April” and the repeated sounds and pattern of stress of “clean as a quiver of knives.” O’Malley has a light touch but leaves a big impression.
“Holy”
The days lengthen, the sky quickens.
Something invisible flows in the sticks
and they blossom. We learn to let this
be enough. It isn’t; it’s enough to go on.
Then a lull and a clip on my phone
of a small girl playing with a tennis ball
her three-year-old face a chalice brimming
with life, and I promise when all this is over
I will remember what is holy. I will say
the word without shame, and ask if God
was his own fable to help us bear absence,
the cold space at the heart of the atom.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the e-copy for review.
The Best Books from the First Half of 2024
Hard to believe, but it’s that time of year already! It’s the eighth year in a row that I’ve been making a first-half superlatives list. It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year rundown, but for now, these are my 18 favourite 2024 releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top 20% of my current-year reading). One is a bonus in that it won’t actually be published until August; six happen to be books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness. Pictured below are the ones I read in print; all the others were e-copies. Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: This nuanced debut novel alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and time travel sci-fi, making clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress. The narrator is a “bridge” helping to resettle a Victorian polar explorer in near-future London. You just have to suspend disbelief and go with it. Bradley’s descriptive prose is memorable but never quirky for the sake of it. I haven’t had so much fun with a book since Romantic Comedy. A witty, sexy, off-kilter gem.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj: Darraj’s second novel-in-stories is a shimmering composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. Each of the stories (four in the first person, five in the third person) spotlights a particular character. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s.
Piglet by Lottie Hazell: The protagonist works for a cookbook publisher, loves to cook, and has a history of overeating during psychological distress. When her fiancé blindsides her with a confession 13 days before their wedding, she returns to binge eating, dress fittings be damned. Food is also a sign of her education and class pretensions. Uncomfortable themes, but I kept reading in fascinated horror because Hazell writes absolutely incredible scenes. This is also about what women are allowed to want, and how they are expected to settle.
Wellness by Nathan Hill: A state-of-the-nation novel filtered through one Chicago family experiencing midlife and marital crises: underperforming academic Jack; his wife Elizabeth, a placebo researcher at Wellness; and their YouTube-obsessed son Toby. They’ve recently invested their life savings in a new condo. The addictive and spot-on novel asks questions about authenticity, purpose, and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? Hill is clearly fascinated with psychological experimentation but also turns it to humorous effect.
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim: Over 2.5 days in June 2020, a Korean American family (mother Hannah and 20-year-old twins Mia and John, home from college for the lockdown) investigates, on their own and with the help of police and tip-offs, what happened to the father, Adam, who’d been at River Falls Park with the severely disabled 14-year-old son, Eugene, who is autistic and has mosaic Angelman syndrome. Mia narrates, and it’s a pleasure spending time with her quick, systematic brain as she considers each theory and red herring.
Company by Shannon Sanders: This energetic debut novel in 13 linked stories traces several generations of the Collins clan, whose experiences at once exemplify African American gentrification and evoke timeless patterns of parental legacy and sibling jealousy. Sisters Cassandra, Fay, Lee and Suzette grew up at their parents’ Atlantic City jazz club before going their separate ways. We revisit relatives at different points in their lives, mostly between the 1990s and the present day. Celebration scenes make for memorable moments.
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang (illus. LeUyen Pham): A super-cute teen story with gorgeous illustrations, including lots of pink and red to suit the theme. We follow Vietnamese-American Valentina through high school as she plays host to an internal debate between cynicism and romanticism. Ever since her mother left, she’s longed to believe in romance but feared that love is a doomed prospect for her family. The Asian community of Oakland, California and a new hobby of lion dancing provide engrossing cultural detail.
Nonfiction
Intervals by Marianne Brooker: An extended essay about her mother’s protracted death with multiple sclerosis and the issues it brought up around disability, poverty, and inequality of access to medical care and services. Brooker decries the injustice of the wealthy having the option of travelling to Dignitas in Switzerland for an assisted death, whereas her single mother had so such relief in sight. Brooker’s description of the vigil of the last days, like her account of her vivacious mother’s life, is both tender and unflinching.
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s Manhattan apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell. Throughout the book, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell’s death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger: Poignant interlocking essays about female friendship. Love and death coexist here. Dancyger’s first best friend was her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20. “Sad Girls” takes on Sylvia Plath fandom. Dancyger also maps her bisexuality and ponders whether to have a child. She is nostalgic for the freedom of being young and unsupervised in New York City and Europe. A sensitive interrogation of women’s relationships, perfect for fans of Melissa Febos and Emma Straub.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti: Heti put 10 years of diary contents into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence, and then ruthlessly culled the results. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of her oeuvre: obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity, but also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding chronology. Remarkably, the collage approach produces a genuine, crystalline vision of the self. A sui generis work of life writing.
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie: This impassioned auto/biographical collage combines the strengths of oral history, group biography and a fragmented memoir. “Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key. As readers, we watch her life, her thinking and the book all take shape. It’s intimate and empathetic, with layers of stories that reflect diversity of experience.
The Age of Loneliness: Essays by Laura Marris: A perceptive, moving collection of nine braided essays linking personal experience of loss with the climate crisis. “Cancerine” is a strong example. Cancer, the sign of the crab, was her father’s cause of death; horseshoe crabs were ground into fertilizer in the 19th century, and their blood is still harvested for biomedical testing. Driven by curiosity and environmental conscience, these reflective pieces reminiscent of Helen Macdonald’s longform journalism ponder human responsibility and resilience. [Graywolf Press, 6 August]
Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie: I’ve not had much success with Rushdie’s fiction, but this is excellent, with intriguing side tendrils and lots of quotable lines. It traces lead-up and aftermath; unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some medical detail about his recovery, you get the sense of him more as an unchanging mind and a resolute will. The most remarkable section imagines dialogues between him and his imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations.
Poetry
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali: In this poised debut collection by a Muslim poet, spiritual enlightenment is a female, embodied experience, mediated by the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths. Ali’s poems hymn women’s bodies, desire, and motherhood. She blurs the line between human and divine with her allusions to the Quran. Ambivalence towards faith is clear in the alliteration-laden verse that recalls Kaveh Akbar’s. Wordplay, floral metaphors, and multiple ghazals make for dazzling language.
Baby Schema by Isabel Galleymore: A slant-wise look at environmental crisis and an impending decision about motherhood. The title comes from Konrad Lorenz’s identification of features that invite nurture. Galleymore edges towards the satirical fantasies of Caroline Bird or Patricia Lockwood as she imagines alternative scenarios of caregiving. What is worthy of maternal concern? Does cuteness merit survival? Extinction and eco-grief on the one hand, yes, but the implacability of biological cycles on the other. Sardonic yet humane.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez: This debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming, tornadoes and cicadas. But her Kansas isn’t all rose-tinted nostalgia; there’s an edge of sadness and danger. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. In “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator turns sinister. She also takes inspiration from headlines. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for. (Full review to come.)
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick: Motherhood and the body are overarching themes. The speaker experiences multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own, while the second long section is about her husband transitioning. Bird metaphors are inescapable. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is dark humour and one-line rejoinders. If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further.
Two of the novels above were among my Most Anticipated books of the year. I’ve now read 10 of the 12 on that list and DNFed another (the Sarah Perry), which just leaves Memory Piece by Lisa Ko to find – though others’ responses make me think it might not be worthwhile to do so. I sometimes wonder if designating a book as anticipated or a priority is a kiss of death, as I was at least somewhat disappointed with over half of my choices this time.
In the second part of the year, I’m looking forward to new releases from Rachel Clarke, Sarah Manguso, Charlotte Mendelson, Richard Powers, Sally Rooney, Elizabeth Strout and Evie Wyld.
What 2024 releases should I catch up on? What’s in your sights for the rest of the year?
June Releases by Caroline Bird, Kathleen Jamie, Glynnis MacNicol and Naomi Westerman
These four books by women all incorporate life writing to an extent. Although the forms differ, a common theme – as in the other June releases I’ve reviewed, Sandwich and Others Like Me – is grappling with what a woman’s life should be, especially for those who have taken an unconventional path (i.e. are queer or childless) or are in midlife or later. I’ve got a poet up to her usual surreal shenanigans but with a new focus on lesbian parenting; a hybrid collection of poetry and prose giving snapshots of nature in crisis; an account of a writer’s hedonistic month in pandemic-era Paris; and mordant essays about death culture.
Ambush at Still Lake by Caroline Bird
Caroline Bird has become one of my favourite contemporary poets over the past few years. Her verse is joyously cheeky and absurdist. A great way to sample it is via her selected poems, Rookie. This seventh collection is muted by age and circumstance – multiple weddings and a baby – but still hilarious in places. Instead of rehab or hospital as in In These Days of Prohibition, the setting is mostly the domestic sphere. Even here, bizarre things happen. The police burst in at 4 a.m. for no particular reason; search algorithms and the baby monitor go haywire. Her brother calls to deliver a paranoid rant (in “Up and at ’Em”), while Nannie Edna’s dying wish is to dangle her great-grandson from her apartment window (in “Last Rites”). The clinic calls to announce that their sperm donor was a serial killer – then ‘oops, wrong vial, never mind!’ A toddler son’s strange and megalomaniac demands direct their days. My two favourites were “Ants,” in which a kitchen infestation signals general chaos, and “The Frozen Aisle,” in which a couple scrambles to finish the grocery shop and get home to bed before a rare horny moment passes. A lesbian pulp fiction cover, mischievous wit and topics of addiction and queer parenting: this is not your average poetry.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
A sample poem:
Siblings
A woman gave birth
to the reincarnation
of Gilbert and Sullivan
or rather, two reincarnations:
one Gilbert, one Sullivan.
What are the odds
of both being resummoned
by the same womb
when they could’ve been
a blue dart frog
and a supply teacher
on separate continents?
Yet here they were, squidged
into a tandem pushchair
with their best work
behind them, still smarting
from the critical reception
of their final opera
described as ‘but an echo’
of earlier collaborations.
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
As she approached age 60, Kathleen Jamie found her style changing. Whereas her other essay collections alternate extended nature or travel pieces with few-page vignettes, Cairn eschews longer material and instead alternates poems with micro-essays on climate crisis and outdoor experiences. In the prologue she calls these “distillations and observations. Testimonies” that she has assembled into “A cairn of sorts.”
As in Surfacing, she writes many of the autobiographical fragments in the second person. The book is melancholy at times, haunted by all that has been lost and will be lost in the future:
What do we sense on the moor but ghost folk,
ghost deer, even ghost wolf. The path itself is a
phantom, almost erased in ling and yellow tormentil (from “Moor”)
In “The Bass Rock,” Jamie laments the effect that bird flu has had on this famous gannet colony and wishes desperately for better news:
The light glances on the water. The haze clears, and now the rock is visible; it looks depleted. But hallelujah, a pennant of twenty-odd gannets is passing, flying strongly, now rising now falling They’ll be Bass Rock birds. What use the summer sunlight, if it can’t gleam on a gannet’s back? You can only hope next year will be different. Stay alive! You call after the flying birds. Stay alive!
Natural wonders remind her of her own mortality and the insignificance of human life against deep time. “I can imagine the world going on without me, which one doesn’t at 30.” She questions the value of poetry in a time of emergency: “If we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive. How to write a lyric poem?” (from “Summer”). The same could be said of any human endeavour in the face of extinction: We question the point but still we continue.
My two favourite pieces were “The Handover,” about going on an environmental march with her son and his friends in Glasgow and comparing it with the protests of her time (Greenham Common and nuclear disarmament) – doom and gloom was ever thus – and the title poem, which piles natural image on image like a cone of stones. Although I prefer the depth of Jamie’s other books to the breadth of this one, she is an invaluable nature writer for her wisdom and eloquence, and I am grateful we have heard from her again after five years.
With thanks to Sort Of Books for the free copy for review.
I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris by Glynnis MacNicol
I loved New York City freelance writer Glynnis MacNicol’s No One Tells You This (2018), which approached her 40th year as an adventure into the unknown. This second memoir is similarly frank and intrepid as MacNicol examines the unconscious rules that people set for women in their mid-forties and gleefully flouts them, remaining single and childfree and delighting in the freedom that allows her to book a month in Paris on a whim. She knows that she is an anomaly for being “untethered”; “I am ready for anything. To be anyone.”
This takes place in August 2021, when some pandemic restrictions were still in force, and she found the city – a frequent destination for her over the years – drained of locals, who were all en vacances, and largely empty of tourists, too. Although there was still a queue for the Mona Lisa, she otherwise found the Louvre very quiet, and could ride her borrowed bike through the streets without having to look out for cars. She and her single girlfriends met for rosé-soaked brunches and picnics, joined outdoor dance parties and took an island break.
And then there was the sex. MacNicol joined a hook-up app called Fruitz and met all sorts of men. She refused to believe that, just because she was 46 going on 47, she should be invisible or demure. “All the attention feels like pure oxygen. Anything is possible.” Seeing herself through the eyes of an enraptured 27-year-old Italian reminded her that her body was beautiful even if it wasn’t what she remembered from her twenties (“there is, on average, a five-year gap between current me being able to enjoy the me in the photos”). The book’s title is something she wrote while messaging with one of her potential partners.
As I wrote yesterday about Others Like Me, there are plenty of childless role models but you may have to look a bit harder for them. MacNicol does so by tracking down the Paris haunts of women writers such as Edith Wharton and Colette. She also interrogates this idea of women living a life of pleasure by researching the “odalisque” in 18th- and 19th-century art, as in the François Boucher painting on the cover. This was fun, provocative and thoughtful all at once; well worth seeking out for summer reading and armchair travelling.
(Read via Edelweiss) Published in the USA by Penguin Life/Random House.
Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief & Bereavement across Cultures by Naomi Westerman
Like Erica Buist (This Party’s Dead) and Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?), playwright Naomi Westerman finds the comical side of death. Part of 404 Ink’s Inklings series (“Big ideas, pocket-sized books” – perfect for anyone looking for short nonfiction for Novellas in November!), this is a collection of short essays about her own experiences of bereavement as well as her anthropological research into rituals and beliefs around death. “The Rat King of South London” is about her father’s sudden death from an abdominal aneurysm. An instantaneous death is a good one, she contends. More than 160,000 people die every day, and what to do with all those bodies is a serious question. A subversive sense of humour is there right from the start, as she gives a rundown of interment options. “Mummification: Beloved by Ancient Egyptians and small children going through their Ancient Egypt phase, it’s a classic for a reason!” Meanwhile, she legally owns her father’s plot so also buries dead pet rats there.
Other essays are about taking her mother’s ashes along on world travels, the funeral industry and “red market” sales of body parts, grief as a theme in horror films, the fetishization of dead female bodies, Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities, and true crime obsession. In “Batman,” an excerpt from one of her plays, she goes to have a terrible cup of tea with the man she believes to be responsible for her mother’s death – a violent one, after leaving an abusive relationship. She also used the play to host an on-stage memorial for her mother since she wasn’t able to sit shiva. In the final title essay, Westerman tours lots of death cafés and finds comfort in shared experiences. These pieces are all breezy, amusing and easy to read, so it’s a shame that this small press didn’t achieve proper proofreading, making for a rather sloppy text, and that the content was overall too familiar for me.
With thanks to 404 Ink and publicist Claire Maxwell for the free copy for review.
Does one or more of these catch your eye?
What June releases can you recommend?
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie
I’ve read quite a lot about matrescence and motherhood so far this year, and I value these women authors’ perspectives on their experiences. There is much that resonates with me as I look back to my relationships with my parents and observe how my sister, brother-in-law and friends are raising their children. Yet as I read of the joys and struggles of parenthood, I do sometimes think, what about the rest of us? That’s the question that drove Nicole Louie to write this impassioned book, which combines the strengths of an oral history, a group biography and a fragmented memoir. Like me, she was in search of role models, and found plenty of them – first on the library shelves and then in daily life by interviewing women she encountered through work or via social media.
The 14 Q&As, shaped into first-person narratives, are interspersed with Louie’s own story, creating a chorus of voices advocating for women’s freedom. The particulars of their situations vary widely. A Venezuelan graphic designer with MS doesn’t want to have a baby to try to fill a perceived lack. A blind Canadian writer hopes for children but knows it may be too complicated on her own. A Ghanaian asexual woman confronts her culture’s traditional expectations of woman. A British nurse in her sixties is philosophical about not having a long-term relationship at the right time, and focuses instead on the thousands of people she’s been able to care for.
The subjects come from Iceland, Peru, the Isle of Man; they are undecided, living with illness or disability, longing but unpartnered, or utterly convinced that motherhood is not for them. Their reasons are logical, psychological, personal and/or environmental, and so many of their conclusions rang true for me:
I just want to make the most of what’s here now instead of always having to long for something else I don’t already have.
I have this strong core intent to be useful to society. To channel as much energy into it as I would put into raising two children … You can’t experience everything available to you in life. So you make choices, and you decide which paths to take and which ones to leave behind without trying. And that’s okay. What’s important is to move forward with intent.
Louie herself has an interesting background: she’s Brazilian but has lived in Sweden, the UK and Ireland. Her work as a copywriter and translator has taken her behind the scenes in training AI. She first had to give serious thought to the question of becoming a mother in 2009, when it became an issue in her first marriage. But, really, she’d known for a long time that it didn’t appeal to her – at age six she was given a doll whose tummy opened to reveal a baby and quickly exchanged that toy for another. A late diagnosis of PCOS and a complicated relationship with her own mother only reinforced a clear conviction.
Other works that I’ve encountered on childlessness, such as Childless Voices by Lorna Gibb (2019) and No One Talks about This Stuff: Twenty-Two Stories of Almost Parenthood, ed. Kat Brown (2024), are heavily weighted towards infertility. Here the spotlight is much more on being childfree, although the blurb is inclusive, speaking of “women who are not mothers by choice, infertility, circumstance or ambivalence.” (I love the inclusion of that final word.)
“Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key for her. As readers, then, we have the honour of watching her life, her thinking and the book all take shape simultaneously in the narrative. A lovely point to mention is that Molly Peacock (The Analyst and A Friend Sails in on a Poem) mentored her throughout the composition process.
Intimate and empathetic, Others Like Me is also elegantly structured, with layers of stories that reflect diversity and the intersectionality of challenges. This auto/biographical collage of life without children will be reassuring for many, and a learning opportunity for others. I’m so glad it exists.
With thanks to Nicole Louie and Dialogue Books for the proof copy for review.
Buy Others Like Me from Bookshop.org in the UK [affiliate link]
#ReadingtheMeow2024 and 20 Books of Summer, 2: Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy
Reviews of books about cats have been a standard element on my blog over the years, and the second annual Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, was a good excuse to pick up some more. Tomorrow I’ll review two cat-themed novels; today I have a 2002 memoir that I have been meaning to read for ages.
I discovered Piercy through her poetry, then read Woman on the Edge of Time, a feminist classic that contrasts utopian and dystopian views of the future. Like May Sarton (whom Piercy knew), she devotes equal energy to both fiction and poetry and is an inveterate cat lady. Piercy is still publishing and blogging at 88; I have much to catch up on from her back catalogue. A précis of her life is almost stranger than fiction: she grew up in poverty in Detroit, joining a teen gang and discovering her sexuality first with other girls (“The first time I had an orgasm—I was eleven—I was astonished and also I had a feeling of recognition. Of course, that’s it. As if that was what I had been expecting or looking for”) then with men; had a couple abortions, including one self-administered, then got sterilized; honed her writing craft at college; married three times – briefly to a Frenchman, an unhappy open arrangement, and now for 40+ years to fellow writer Ira Wood; and wrote like a dervish yet has remained on the periphery of the literary establishment and thus struggled financially.
Political activism has been a constant for Piercy, whether protesting the Vietnam War or supporting women’s reproductive rights. She and Wood also nurtured a progressive Jewish community around their Cape Cod home. Again like Sarton, she has always embraced the term feminist but been more resistant to queerness. A generational thing, perhaps; nowadays we would surely call Piercy bisexual or at least sexually fluid, but she’s more apt to dismiss her teen girlfriends and her later affairs with women as a phase. The personal life and career mesh here, though there is more of a focus on the former, such that I haven’t really gotten a clear idea of which of her novels I might want to try. Each chapter ends with one of her poems (wordy, autobiographical free verse), giving a flavour of her work in other genres. She portrays herself as a nomad who wandered various cities before settling into an unexpectedly homely and seasonal existence: “I am a stray cat who has finally found a good home.”
I admired Piercy’s self-knowledge here: her determination to write (including to keep her late mother alive in her) and to preserve the solitude necessary to her work –
I know I am an intense, rather angular passionate woman, not easy to like, not easy to live with, even for myself. Convictions, causes jostle in me. My appetites are large. I have learned to protect my work time and my privacy fiercely. I have been a better writer than a person, and again and again I made that choice. Writing is my core. I do not regret the security I have sacrificed to serve it.
and her conviction that motherhood was not for her –
I did not want children. I never felt I would be less of a woman, but I feared I would be less of a writer if I reproduced. I didn’t feel anything special about my genetic composition warranted replicating it. … I liked many of my friends’ children as they grew older: I was a good aunt. But I never desired to possess them or have one of my own. … I have never regretted staying childless. My privacy, my time for work … are precious. I feel my life is full enough.
“There were no role models for a woman like me,” she felt at the end of college, but she can in her turn be a role model of the female artist’s life, socially engaged and willing to take risks.
As to the title: There is, of course, special delight here for cat lovers. Piercy has had cats since she was a child, and in the Cape Cod era has usually kept a band of five or so. In the interludes we meet some true characters: Arofa the Siamese, Cho-Cho who lived to 21, mother and son Dinah and Oboe, alpha male Jim Beam, and many more. Of course, they age and fall ill and there are some goodbye scenes. She mostly describes these unsentimentally – if you’ve read Doris Lessing on cats, I’d say the attitude is similar. There are extremes of both love and despair: she licks a kitten to bond with her; she euthanizes one beloved cat herself. She wrote this memoir at 65 and felt that her cats were teaching her how to age.
There is a sadness to living with old cats; also a comfort and pleasure, for you know each other thoroughly and the trust is almost absolute. … The knowledge of how much I will miss them is always with me, but so is the sense of my own time flowing out, my life passing and the necessity to value it as I value them. Old cats are precious.
Even those unfamiliar with Piercy’s work might enjoy reading a perspective on the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. This was right up my street because of her love of cats, her defence of the childfree life, and her interest in identity and memory. Because she doesn’t talk in depth about her oeuvre, you needn’t have read anything else of hers to appreciate reading this. I hope you have a cat who will nap on your lap as you do so. (Secondhand, a gift from my wish list)
#ReadIndies and Review Catch-up: Hazrat, Nettel, Peacock, Seldon
Another four selections for Read Indies month. I’m particularly pleased that two from this latest batch are “just because” books that I picked up off my shelves; another two are catch-up review copies. A few more indie titles will appear in my February roundup on Tuesday. For today, I have a fun variety: a history of the exclamation point, a Mexican novel about choosing motherhood versus being childfree, a memoir of a decades-long friendship between two poets, and a posthumous poetry collection with themes of history, illness and nature.
An Admirable Point: A brief history of the exclamation mark by Florence Hazrat (2022)
I’m definitely a punctuation geek. (My favourite punctuation mark is the semicolon, and there’s a book about it, too: Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson, which I have on my Kindle.) One might think that strings of exclamation points are a pretty new thing – rounding off phrases in (ex-)presidential tweets, for instance – but, in fact, Hazrat opens with a Boston Gazette headline from 1788 that decried “CORRUPTION AND BRIBERY!!!” in relation to the adoption of the new Constitution.
The exclamation mark as we know it has been around since 1399, and by the 16th century its use for expression and emphasis had been codified. I was reminded of Gretchen McCulloch’s discussion of emoji in Because Internet, which also considers how written speech signifies tone, especially in the digital age. There have been various proposals for other “intonation points” over the centuries, but the question mark and exclamation mark are the two that have stuck. (Though I’m currently listening to an album called interrobang – ‽, that is. Invented by Martin Speckter in 1962; recorded by Switchfoot in 2021.)
I most enjoyed Chapter 3, on punctuation in literature. Jane Austen’s original manuscripts, replete with dashes, ampersands and exclamation points, were tidied up considerably before they made it into book form. She’s literature’s third most liberal user of exclamation marks, in terms of the number per 100,000 words, according to a chart Ben Blatt drew up in 2017, topped only by Tom Wolfe and James Joyce.
There are also sections on the use of exclamation points in propaganda and political campaigns – in conjunction with fonts, which brought to mind Simon Garfield’s Just My Type and the graphic novel ABC of Typography. It might seem to have a niche subject, but at just over 150 pages this is a cheery and diverting read for word nerds.
With thanks to Profile Books for the proof copy for review.
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (2020; 2022)
[Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey]
This was the Mexican author’s fourth novel; she’s also a magazine director and has published several short story collections. I’d liken it to a cross between Motherhood by Sheila Heti and (the second half of) No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Thirtysomething friends Laura and Alina veer off in different directions, yet end up finding themselves in similar ethical dilemmas. Laura, who narrates, is adamant that she doesn’t want children, and follows through with sterilization. However, when she becomes enmeshed in a situation with her neighbours – Doris, who’s been left by her abusive husband, and her troubled son Nicolás – she understands some of the emotional burden of motherhood. Even the pigeon nest she watches on her balcony presents a sort of morality play about parenthood.
Meanwhile, Alina and her partner Aurelio embark on infertility treatment. Laura fears losing her friend: “Alina was about to disappear and join the sect of mothers, those creatures with no life of their own who, zombie-like, with huge bags under their eyes, lugged prams around the streets of the city.” They eventually have a daughter, Inés, but learn before her birth that brain defects may cause her to die in infancy or be severely disabled. Right from the start, Alina is conflicted. Will she cling to Inés no matter her condition, or let her go? And with various unhealthy coping mechanisms to hand, will her relationship with Aurelio stay the course?
Laura alternates between her life and her friends’ circumstances, taking on an omniscient voice on Nettel’s behalf – she recounts details she couldn’t possibly be privy to, at least not at the time (there’s a similar strategy in The Group by Lara Feigel). The question of what is fated versus what is chosen, also represented by Laura’s interest in tarot and palm-reading, always appeals to me. This was a wry and sharp commentary on women’s options. (Giveaway win from Bookish Chat on Twitter)
Still Born was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in the USA on August 8th.
A Friend Sails in on a Poem by Molly Peacock (2022)
I’ve read one of Peacock’s poetry collections, The Analyst, as well as her biography of Mary Delany, The Paper Garden. I was delighted when she got in touch to offer a review copy of her latest memoir, which reflects on her nearly half a century of friendship with fellow poet Phillis Levin. They met in a Johns Hopkins University writing seminar in 1976, and ever since have shared their work in progress over meals. They are seven years apart in age and their careers took different routes – Peacock headed up the Poetry Society of America’s subway poetry project and then moved to Toronto, while Levin taught at the University of Maryland – but over the years they developed “a sense of trust that really does feel familial … There is a weird way, in our conversations about poetry, that we share a single soul.” For a time they were both based in New York City and had the same therapist; more recently, they arranged annual summer poetry retreats in Cazenovia (recalled via diary entries), with just the two attendees. Jobs and lovers came and went, but their bond has endured.
The book traces their lives but also their development as poets, through examples of their verse. Her friend is “Phillis” in real life, but “Levin” when it’s her work is being discussed – and her own poems are as written by “Peacock.” Both women became devoted to the sonnet, an unusual choice because at the time that they were graduate students free verse reigned and form was something one had to learn on one’s own time. Stanza means “room,” Peacock reminds readers, and she believes there is something about form that opens up space, almost literally but certainly metaphorically, to re-examine experience. She repeatedly tracks how traumatic childhood events, as much as everyday observations, were transmuted into her poetry. Levin did so, too, but with an opposite approach: intellectual and universal where Peacock was carnal and personal. That paradox of difference yet likeness is the essence of the friendships we sail on. What a lovely read, especially if you’re curious about ‘where poems come from’; I’d particularly recommend it to fans of Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty.
With thanks to Molly Peacock and Palimpsest Press for the free e-copy for review.
The Bright White Tree by Joanna Seldon (Worple Press, 2017)
This appeared the year after Seldon died of cancer; were it not for her untimely end and her famous husband Anthony (a historian and political biographer), I’m not sure it would have been published, as the poetry is fairly mediocre, with some obvious rhymes and twee sentiments. I wouldn’t want to speak ill of the dead, though, so think of this more like a self-published work collected in tribute, and then no problem. Some of the poems were written from the Royal Marsden Hospital, with “Advice” a useful rundown of how to be there for a friend undergoing cancer treatment (text to let them know you’re thinking of them; check before calling, or visiting briefly; bring sanctioned snacks; don’t be afraid to ask after their health).
Seldon takes inspiration from history (the story of Kitty Pakenham, the bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas), travels in England and abroad (“Robin in York” vs. “Tuscan Garden”), and family history. Her Jewish heritage is clear from poems about Israel, National Holocaust Memorial Day and Rosh Hashanah. Her own suffering is put into perspective in “A Cancer Patient Visits Auschwitz.” There are also ekphrastic responses to art and literature (a Gaugin, A Winter’s Tale, Jane Eyre, and so on). I particularly liked “Conker,” a reminder of a departed loved one “So is a good life packed full of doing / That may grow warm with others, even when / The many years have turned, and darkness filled / Places where memory shone bright and strong. / I feel the conker and feel he is here.” (New bargain book from Waterstones online sale with Christmas book token)
There are haikus dotted through the collection; here’s one perfect for the season:
“Snowdrops Haiku”
Maids demure, white tips to
Mob caps… Look now! They’ve
Splattered the lawn with snow
Have you discovered any new-to-you independent publishers recently?
Childless Voices by Lorna Gibb
People end up not having children for any number of reasons: medical issues, bereavement, a lack of finances, not having a partner at the right time, or the simple decision not to become a parent. The subtitle of Lorna Gibb’s Childless Voices acknowledges these various routes: “Stories of Longing, Loss, Resistance and Choice.”
For Gibb, a university lecturer, biographer and novelist, the childless state was involuntary, a result of severe endometriosis that led to infertility and early menopause. Although this has been a source of sadness for her and her husband, she knows that she has it easy compared to women in other parts of the world. Through her research and Skype interviews, she hears horrific stories about infertile women who meet with domestic violence and social ostracism and are sometimes driven to suicide. In Ghana childless women can be branded as witches and exiled. Meanwhile, some are never given the chance to have the children they might long for: Gibb cites China’s one-child policy, female genital mutilation, and enforced sterilization programs like those of the Roma in Yugoslavia and the Quechua in Peru.
Gibb is admirably comprehensive here, considering every possible aspect of childlessness. Particularly interesting are the different cultural adaptations childless women make. Certain countries allow polygamy, giving a second wife a chance to bear children on behalf of an infertile one; Kenya and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa recognize ‘marriages’ between childless women so they can create a family and support system. In Albania being a “sworn virgin” is an old and venerable custom. And, of course, there are any number of support groups and online communities. The situation of those who were once parents but are no longer is especially wrenching. Stillbirth only started to be talked about in the 1980s, Gibb notes, but even today is seen as a lesser loss than that of a child who dies later in life.
The author believes there is societal injustice in terms of who has access to fertility treatment and how the state deals with childless people. In the UK, she characterizes IVF as a “postcode lottery”: where you live often determines how many free cycles you’re entitled to on the NHS. In the USA, meanwhile, fertility treatment is so expensive that only those with a certain level of wealth can consider it. The childless may also feel ‘punished’ by tax breaks that favor parents and workplaces that expect non-parents to work unsociable hours. In a sense, then, the childless contribute more but benefit less.
Chosen childlessness is perhaps given short shrift at just 32 pages out of 239. However, it’s still a very thorough treatment of the reasons why couples decide not to become parents, including cultural norms, career goals, self-knowledge and environmental concerns. No surprise that this was the chapter that resonated with me the most. I also especially enjoyed the personal interludes (all titled “A Short Note on…”) in which Gibb celebrates her feminist, childless heroes like Frida Kahlo and Anaïs Nin and writes about how much becoming a godmother meant to her but also of the sadness of seeing a good friend’s teenage son die of a brain tumor.
By coincidence, I’ve recently read another book on the same topic: Do You Have Kids? Life when the Answer Is No, by Kate Kaufmann (coming out in America next month). Gibb primarily traces the many different reasons for childlessness; Kaufmann mostly addresses the question of “now what?” – how women without children approach careers, wider family life, housing options, spirituality and the notion of leaving a legacy. Gibb’s approach is international and comparative, while Kaufmann’s is largely specific to the USA. Though the two authors are childless due to endometriosis and infertility, they feel sisterhood with women who never became mothers for whatever reason. I’d say these two books are complementary rather than rivals, and reveal valuable perspectives that can sometimes be overlooked.
My rating: 
Childless Voices was published by Granta on February 7th. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 