Recent Poetry Releases by Clarke, Galleymore, Hurst, and Minick
All caught up on March releases now. There’s a lot of nature and environmental awareness in these four poetry collections, but also pandemic lockdown experiences, folklore, travel, and an impasse over whether to have children. Three are from Carcanet Press, my UK poetry mainstay; one was my introduction to Madville Publishing (based in Lake Dallas, Texas). After my thoughts, I’ll give one sample poem from each book.
The Silence by Gillian Clarke
Clarke was the National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016. I ‘discovered’ her just last year through Making the Beds for the Dead, which shares with this eleventh collection a plague theme: there, the UK’s foot and mouth disease outbreak of 2001; here, Covid-19. Forced into stillness and attention to the wonders near home, the poet tracks nature through the seasons and hymns trees, sunsets and birds. Many poems are titled after months or calendar points such as Midsummer and Christmas Eve. She also commemorates Welsh landmarks and remembers her mother, a nurse.
The verse is full of colours and names of flora:
May-gold’s gone to seed, yellows fallen –
primrose, laburnum, Welsh poppy.
June is rose, magenta, purple,
pink clematis, mopheads of chives,
cranesbill flowering where it will,
a migration of foxgloves crossing the field.
(from “Late June”)
Even as she revels in beauty, though, she bears in mind suffering elsewhere:
There is time and silence
to tell the names of the dying, the dead,
under empty skies unscarred
by transatlantic planes.
(from “Spring Equinox, 2020”)
I noted alliteration (“At the tip of every twig, / a water-bead with the world in it”) and end rhymes (“After long isolation, in times like these, / in the world’s darkness, let us love like trees.”). All told, I found this collection lovely but samey and lacking bite. But Clarke is in her late eighties and has a large back catalogue for me to explore.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
Baby Schema by Isabel Galleymore
I knew Galleymore’s name from her appearance at the New Networks for Nature conference in 2018. The University of Birmingham lecturer’s second collection is 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 and contrasts sentimentality with indifference.
What is worthy of maternal concern? There are poems about a houseplant, a childhood doll, a soft toy glimpsed through a car window. A research visit to Disneyland Paris in the centenary year of the Walt Disney Company leads to marvelling at the surreality of consumerism. Does cuteness merit survival?
Because rhinos haven’t adopted the small
muscle responsible for puppy dog eyes,
the species goes bankrupt.
Its regional stores close down.
(from “The Pitch”)
The speaker acknowledges how gooey she goes over dogs (“Morning”) and kittens (“So Adorable”). But “Mothers” and “Chosen” voice ambivalence or even suspicion about offspring, and “Fable” spins a mild nightmare of infants taking over (“babies nesting in other babies / of cliff and reef and briar”). By the time, in “More and More,” she pictures a son, “a sticky-fingered, pint-sized / version of myself toddling through the aisles,” she concludes that we live in a depleted “world better off without him.”
Extinction and eco-grief on the one hand, yes, but the implacability of biological cycles on the other:
That night, when I got home, I learnt
a tree frog species had been lost
and my body was releasing its usual sum of blood.
I only had a few years left, my mother
often warned
(from “Release”)
Sardonic yet humane, and reassuringly indecisive, this is a poetry highlight of the year so far for me. I’ll go back and find her debut, Significant Other, too.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free e-copy for review.
The Iron Bridge by Rebecca Hurst
Manchester-based Hurst’s debut full-length collection struck me first for its gorgeous nature poetry arising from a series of walks. Most of these are set in Southern England in the current century, but date and location stamps widen the view as far as 1976 in the one case and Massachusetts in the other. The second section entices with its titles drawn from folklore and mythology: “How the Fox Lost His Brush,” “The Animal Bridegroom,” “The Needle Prince,” “And then we saw the daughter of the minotaur.”
An unexpected favourite, for its alliteration, assonance and book metaphors in the first stanza, was “Cabbage”:
Slung from a trug it rumbles across
the kitchen table, this flabby magenta fist
of stalk and leaf, this bundle of pages
flopping loose from their binding
this globe cleaved with a grunt leaning hard
on the blade
Part III, “Night Journeys,” has more nature verse and introduces a fascination with Russia that continues through the rest of the book. I loved the mischievous quartet of “Field Notes” prose poems about “The careless lover,” “The theatrical lover,” “The corresponding lover,” and “The satisfying lover” – three of them male and one female. The final section, “An Explorer’s Handbook,” includes found poems adapted from the published work of travel writers contemporary (Christina Dodwell) and Victorian (nurse Kate Marsden). Another series, “The Emotional Lives of Soviet Objects,” gives surprising power to a doily, a slipper and a potato peeler.
There’s a huge range of form and subject matter here, but the language is unfailingly stunning. Another standout from 2024 and a poet to watch. From my other Carcanet reading, I’d liken this most to work by Laura Scott and Helen Tookey.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free e-copy for review.
The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick
A new publisher and author for me. Minick has also published fiction and nonfiction; this is his third poetry collection. Between the opener, “To Spoon,” and the title piece that closes the book, there are five more spoon-themed poems that create a pleasing thematic throughline. Why spoons? Unlike potentially violent knives and forks, which cut and spear, spoons are gentle. They’re also reflective surfaces, and because of their concavity, they can hold things and nestle together. In “The Oldest Spoon,” they even bring to mind a guiding constellation.
The rest of the book is full of North American woodland and coastal scenes and wildlife. Minick displays genuine affection for and familiarity with birds. He is also realistic in noting all that is lost with habitat destruction and dwindling populations. “Lasts” describes the bittersweet sensation of loving what is disappearing: “Goodbye, we always say too late, / or we never get a chance to say at all.” He wrestles with human mortality, too, through elegies and minor concerns about his own ageing body. I loved the seasonal imagery and alliteration in “Spangled” and the Rolling Stones refrain to “Gas,” about boat-tailed grackles encountered in the parking lot at a Georgia truck stop.
Why not embrace all that is ugly
& holy & here—the grackle’s song
that isn’t a song, a breadcrumb dropped,
the shiny ribbon of gasoline
that will get me closer to home.
For something a bit different, I appreciated the true-crime monologue of “Tim Slack, the Fix-It Man.” With playfulness and variety, Minick gives us new views on the everyday – which is exactly why it is worth reading poetry.
With thanks to Madville Publishing for the free e-copy for review.
February Releases by Hess, Kim, Sides (#ReadIndies); Atwood and Shah
I’m pleased to have, between this post and yesterday’s review catch-up, featured 9 books from 8 independent publishers for Read Indies this month. (I have also done some indie reading from my shelves, which I’ll summarize early in March.) Three of the books in my February review stacks were indie releases. I’ve got a hybrid memoir that blends poetic exploration of scripture with personal psychological reflections; an out-of-the-ordinary mystery about a father’s disappearance that comments on disability, racism and much more; and a terrific set of fabulist short stories. My two bonus (non-indie) February books are an unconvincing collaborative novel and a counselling-focussed bibliotherapy guide.
When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible by Lory Widmer Hess
Some of you may know Lory, who is training as a spiritual director, from her blog, Enter Enchanted. It was so kind of her to get in touch offering her first book for review. It’s a unique combination of poetry, scriptural exegesis, and fragments of memoir. Each chapter considers a different healing story from the Gospels. As in the lectio divina I learned from college Christian fellowships, the idea with the verse retellings from the Bible is to imagine oneself into a character’s position and consider the crises that led to seeking Jesus’ help. I especially liked the poem “Talitha, Koum,” which links the stories of the woman with the issue of blood and the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter. In both, faith reverses a seemingly hopeless situation.
The short sections of commentary draw in a lot of context as well as etymology from the Greek. The autobiographical essays chart a history of physical and mental challenges, including dissociation, low self-esteem and shame, and offer openness to healing as its own miracle when there are no easy answers. They are notable for their vulnerability, especially when discussing marital problems. The outlook is intellectual and psychological rather than the spiritualizing I’m used to from my evangelical background – Lory comes from the anthroposophy tradition, which I don’t claim to fully understand but (I think) eschews dogma like original sin and atonement and instead makes the spiritual journey a matter of human reconnection with God through free will and the intellect. This is nicely balanced, though, by her work with developmentally disabled adults in residential homes in New England and Switzerland, which reminds her “there is a truth beyond intellectual knowledge, a language beyond words”. It is a calm, honest, methodical book that will intrigue anyone interested in thinking through how the Bible is applicable to the challenges of daily life.
With thanks to the author and Floris Books (Edinburgh) for the free copy for review.
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Buzz from across the pond about Kim’s novels led me to request this even though I don’t typically read mysteries. The bulk is set over 2.5 days in June 2020 as the Korean American Parkson family investigates, on their own and with the help of police and various local 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. Mother Hannah and 20-year-old twins Mia and John, home from college for the lockdown, quickly realise something is wrong when Eugene, who has blood on his shirt and under his nails, stumbles home on his own and Adam is unreachable by phone. There’s more to the setup than that, and many complicated side-tracks to the investigation, but the basic questions remain for 300+ pages: What happened to Adam? and What was Eugene’s part in it?
Mia narrates, and it’s a pleasure spending time with her quick, systematic brain as she runs through all the options and deals with each new theory and red herring. She clearly gets it from her father, whose recovered notebook is full of amateur experimentation on the “Happiness Quotient”. Her wit and garrulousness (sample aside: “I’m sorry, but I don’t care how much you love fun fonts—you cannot talk about prison rape in Comic Sans”) spills over into footnotes as if in effusive counterpoint to Eugene, who is nonspeaking.
The pandemic setting places interesting constraints on the official proceedings, and the prospect of a new communication method (involving painstaking spelling with a letter stencil) revolutionizes this family as they grasp that Eugene is far from nonverbal and has been ‘locked in’ all along. The account a therapist elicits from him seems to clinch the case, but uncertainty lingers.
This is like a blend of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, and Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump; if you’ve liked one or more of these, I would strongly recommend it. Mystery readers may lack patience for the digressions. The solution is eclipsed by the many issues – prejudice based on race and disability, how one’s circumstances affect contentment, nuances of communication, sibling relationships and twin ESP – explored along the way. Because I am not a crime reader, the pace was no problem for me. My annoyances were with the preponderance of hindsight (“I wish I’d said something,” “It didn’t occur to me until much later”) and the fact that Mia says “begs the question” for raising a question (misuse of a rhetorical term) several times. I found personal meaning in the book because of the Washington, DC-area locales and my severely disabled, nonverbal goddaughter. What if there really is something going on in her mind, and we could find out what it was… I mused. I’ll be keen to read Kim’s debut, Miracle Creek.
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.
Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood by Bradley Sides
These 17 flash fiction stories fully embrace the possibilities of magic and weirdness, particularly to help us reconnect with the dead. Brad and I are literary acquaintances from our time working on (the now defunct) Bookkaholic web magazine in 2014–15. I liked this even more than his first book, Those Fantastic Lives (2021), although the contours are very similar. Young people, animals and monsters abound – and sometimes the lines between those identities are unclear. There’s a lot of experimentation with form: a choose-your-own-adventure narrative, a police transcript, a two-truths-and-a-lie challenge, a story all in questions, an English exam, and a letter. A few of my favorite stories were “The Guide to King George,” about an amusement farm’s resident pond monster; “Claire & Hank,” in which a paleontologist’s unearthed Pteranodon becomes a sister to his motherless son; and “Dying at Allium Farm,” whose sassy undead owners think they’re fooling their Tennessee customers. And can you imagine a better title and cover combination?!
With thanks to Montag Press and publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
And a couple of bonus February releases that are not from indie publishers:
Fourteen Days, ed. Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
This Authors Guild Foundation collaborative project is a Covid-era Decameron update in which the residents of an increasingly derelict New York City apartment complex meet on the rooftop every evening for two early lockdown weeks to clap for healthcare workers, indulge in adult beverages, and swap random stories. The tenants all go by nicknames like “Hello Kitty,” “Florida” and “Vinegar.” The frame narrative has the building superintendent (Yessie, a lesbian of Romanian heritage) worrying over her father’s wellbeing in a care home and surreptitiously recording the oral stories on her phone to later transcribe into the “bible” kept by the previous super. We’re told up front that the manuscript ends up in police custody.
I had a misconception that each chapter would be written by a different author. I think that would actually have been the more interesting approach. Instead, each character is voiced by a different author, and sometimes by multiple authors across the 14 chapters (one per day) – a total of 36 authors took part. I soon wearied of the guess-who game. I most enjoyed the frame story, which was the work of Douglas Preston, a thriller author I don’t otherwise know.
There was a promising idea here, but problems with the execution. One is that, for the most part, the stories are pointless. The characters get hung up on whether they’re ‘true’ or not, but for readers it’s all made up and, while one or two individual tales might be amusing, they do nothing to build a plot and so I found myself mostly skipping over them to get back to the interactions on the roof and the super’s commentary. Another is that, to stand out from an ensemble cast, a voice needs to be really distinctive, and only “Eurovision” (flamboyantly gay) was that for me – based on my love for his rabbit story in particular, I should be reading Joseph Cassara. And finally, the book culminates with an annoying twist that made me cross.
With thanks to Chatto & Windus (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading by Bijal Shah
Bibliotherapy is one of my niche bookish interests (see my write-up of my bibliotherapy appointment with Ella Berthoud at the School of Life), so I was delighted to be offered a copy of another relevant book. Bijal Shah grew up in an East African Indian community before moving to the UK with her family as a teenager. When she was in training as a psychodynamic counsellor and attended therapy sessions herself, she realised how helpful literature was in helping her think through traumatic experiences from her past, such as sexism, colourism and a painful break-up. “I have lived half my life in the pages of books,” she observes, “relying on them to put my real life into perspective.” I feel the same way.
The emphasis is very much on therapy here, as Shah elaborates on practices such as literary journaling, recording audio notes, writing poetry, and focusing on gratitude. About half of the book is given over to anonymized sample case studies where she looks at the reasons why a client might come to her for bibliotherapy, the books and exercises she prescribed them, and the sorts of realizations people came to when reflecting on their own lives in relation to what they read. I suspect that the majority of readers, unless they have a vested interest in counselling, will, like me, most enjoy browsing the A–Z list of book prescriptions in the final 20% of the book (with more on Shah’s website). There is good variety to these in terms of author diversity, new vs. backlist reads, and both YA and adult fiction, though most of the recommendations are nonfiction, particularly psychology and self-help: these are much more literal (and, generally, obvious) prescriptions than Berthoud and Elderkin’s playful take.
With thanks to the author and Piatkus (Hachette) for the free copy for review.
Recent Releases by Nathan Hill, Hisham Matar, Sigrid Nunez and More
One key way in which 2024’s reading has already differed from previous years’ is that I no longer avoid doorstoppers. I now classify any book with over 400 pages as a doorstopper, and by that definition I have already gotten through three this year: The Tidal Year plus two of the below, with Wellness standing out as the true whopper at 597 small-print pages. January offered a set of releases full of variety: gritty yet funny flash fiction; a novel of big ideas and big empathy for its flawed characters; an exile’s elegant love letter to Libya from London; a coy pandemic-era reflection on connection and creation; and a tour of nature close to home.
Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories by Elizabeth Bruce
This was a great collection of 33 stories, all of them beginning with the words “One Dollar” and most of flash fiction length. Bruce has a knack for quickly introducing a setup and protagonist. The voice and setting vary enough that no two stories sound the same. What is the worth of a dollar? In some cases, where there’s a more contemporary frame of reference, a dollar is a sign of desperation (for the man who’s lost house, job and wife in “Little Jimmy,” for the coupon-cutting penny-pincher whose unbroken monologue makes up the whole of “Grocery List”), or maybe just enough for a small treat for a child (as in “Mouse Socks” or “Boogie Board”). In the historical stories, a dollar can buy a lot more. It’s a tank of gas – and a lesson on the evils of segregation – in “Gas Station”; it’s a huckster’s exorbitant charge for a mocked-up relic in “The Grass Jesus Walked On.”
The tone ranges from black comedy (“Festus”) to high tragedy (“Votive Candle”), but the book mostly falls within the realm of dirty realism with the attention to working-class country folk, so I’d recommend the collection to fans of authors who perch on the lighter side of that subgenre, such as Barbara Kingsolver or Denis Johnson. A few of my favorite stories, in addition to the above, were “Ice-Cold Water,” which I appreciated for the Washington D.C. setting and the way that an assumption about who would be racist was overturned by a moment of simple compassion; “Dolores,” in which a slick humanitarian fundraiser meets a waitress who has his number; and “Boiling the Buggers,” a window onto Covid-exacerbated mental illness. (Read via BookSirens)
Wellness by Nathan Hill
Somehow nearly eight years have passed since Hill’s debut novel, The Nix, which I dubbed “a rich, multi-layered story about family curses and failure.” I admired it as much for its prose as for its ideas, and Wellness is just as effervescent and insightful. It’s a state-of-the-nation novel filtered through one Chicago family: experimental photographer and 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 and are considering trendy features like open shelves and separate master bedrooms. It would be oversimplifying, but true, to say that this couple is experiencing midlife and marital crises. Their nineties college romance – and a time of life when everything felt open and possible – is so remote now. When Elizabeth suggests they join a friend at a swingers’ club and a patient of hers who’s also a parent at Toby’s school sees them outside, chaos ensues.
Some elements from The Nix carry over, such as campus politics, the American Midwest, and mother–son relationships, but also broader questions of authenticity, purpose and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? The novel spends time with Jack and Elizabeth at the dawn of their relationship and in the present day, but also looks back to their early careers and first years of parenthood. Hill is clearly fascinated with the sort of psychological experimentation Elizabeth engages in (there’s a whole bibliography of scientific papers consulted) but also turns it to humorous effect, as when Elizabeth subjects Toby to the marshmallow test. A lot of information is conveyed through dialogue, yet it never feels forced. A couple of long asides, on Elizabeth’s family history and the algorithms guiding Jack’s interactions with his conspiracy theorist father, tried my patience, but I loved a four-page chapter on a funeral supper where every sentence starts “There was.” Sooooo many quotable lines throughout.
The only fault in an addictive and spot-on novel (how did he know?! you’ll find yourself thinking about your own attitude to work/marriage/children) is that Hill is so committed to excavating these characters’ backstory of stunted emotion – Jack estranged from his religious Kansas farmer parents after a traumatic incident you feel right in the gut; Elizabeth glad to jettison her father’s wealth with his anger – that he hurries through the denouement. Still, this is sure to be a fiction highlight of my year. It’s one for readers of Jonathan Franzen, sure, but I also thought it reminiscent of Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation and Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
My Friends by Hisham Matar
“Benghazi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to.”
Taking a long walk through London one day, Khaled looks back from midlife on the choices he and his two best friends have made. He first came to the UK as an eighteen-year-old student at Edinburgh University. Everything that came after stemmed from one fateful day. Matar places Khaled and his university friend Mustafa at a real-life demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, which ended in a rain of bullets and the accidental death of a female police officer. Khaled’s physical wound is less crippling than the sense of being cut off from his homeland and his family. As he continues his literary studies and begins teaching, he decides to keep his injury a secret from them, as from nearly everyone else in his life. On a trip to Paris to support a female friend undergoing surgery, he happens to meet Hosam, a writer whose work enraptured him when he heard it on the radio back home long ago. Decades pass and the Arab Spring prompts his friends to take different paths.
I’d previously only read Matar’s short nonfiction work A Month in Siena. The slow, meditative style I enjoyed so much there didn’t translate well into doorstopper length; by the 300-page mark I found myself skimming to see if anything else might happen. Despite the title, we come to know Mustafa and Hosam much less well than we do Khaled. I would happily have had the book’s plot and sentiment concentrated into a taut 200 pages. However, I’m still interested in trying other books by Matar. In the Country of Men is significantly shorter and available from the backroom storage area of my library, and his Folio Prize-winning memoir The Return, too, is on shelf and I reckon will be right up my street.
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
I’m a huge Nunez fan after reading The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and especially A Feather on the Breath of God. Her last three books have been very much of a piece: autofiction voiced by an unnamed woman who has a duty of care towards a friend or a friend’s pet and ponders, in wry meta fashion, the nature of autobiographical writing and the meaning of life and death at a time of climate breakdown. Alas, The Vulnerables seems like no more than a rehashing of The Friend, with flanking main characters chosen at random from central casting: a parrot named Eureka and a mentally ill college drop-out called Vetch. This quirky trio is thrown together in a lavish New York City apartment during lockdown and nothing much happens but conversation brings them closer.
A second problem: Covid-19 stories feel dated. For the first two years of the pandemic I read obsessively about it, mostly nonfiction accounts from healthcare workers or ordinary people looking for community or turning to nature in a time of collective crisis. But now when I come across it as a major element in a book, it feels like an out-of-place artefact; I’m almost embarrassed for the author: so sorry, but you missed your moment. My disappointment may primarily be because my expectations were so high. I’ve noted that two blogger friends new to Nunez were enthusiastic about this (but so was Susan, who’d enjoyed her before). That’s not to say this wasn’t a pleasantly fluid and incisive read, even if its message of essential human vulnerability is an obvious one. Anyway, I’ll take Nunez musing on familiar subjects over most other contemporary writers any day:
“Never write ‘I don’t remember,’ Editor says; it undermines your authority. But write as if you remember everything and Reader will smell a rat.”
“You can start with fiction or start with documentary, according to Jean-Luc Goddard. Either way, you will inevitably find the other.”
“I like this clarification by the narrator of a book by Stendhal: ‘It is not out of egotism that I say “I”; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.’)”
(À propos of the doorstoppers above)
“Does that mean a long novel is easier to write than a short one? / Um, no. But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.”
With thanks to Virago for the proof copy for review.
And a bonus work of nonfiction:
Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys
Lev Parikian alerted me to this amiable record of weekly discoveries of the nature on one’s home turf. Humphreys has been an international adventure traveller and written many books about his exploits. Here, by contrast, he zooms the lens in about as far as it will go, ordering a custom-made 20-km-square OS map that has his house at the centre and choosing one surrounding grid square per week (so 52 out of a total of 400) to cycle to and explore. He’s chosen to leave his town unnamed so this can function as an Everyman’s journey through edgelands. And his descriptions and black-and-white photographs really do present an accurate microcosm of modern England: fields, woods, waterways, suburban streets.
From one November to the next, he watches the seasons advance and finds many magical spaces with everyday wonders to appreciate. “This project was already beginning to challenge my assumptions of what was beautiful or natural in the landscape,” he writes in his second week. True, he also finds distressing amounts of litter, no-access signs and evidence of environmental degradation. But curiosity is his watchword: “The more I pay attention, the more I notice. The more I notice, the more I learn.”
Each week’s observations send him down a research rabbit hole, with topics including caves, land management, mudlarking, plant species, and much more. The nature of the short chapters means that there can only ever be a cursory look at huge issues like rewilding and veganism, but Humphreys is nimble in weaving in the brief, matter-of-fact discussions. His eagerness is irrepressible. “How you look, what you see, and the way all this makes you feel: a single map and the best of all possible worlds.” (See also: Paul’s review.)
With thanks to the author for the free copy for review.
Three on a Theme: Matrescence Memoirs (and a Bonus Novel)
I think of pregnancy and childbirth like any extreme adventure (skydiving, polar exploration): wholly extraordinary experiences with much to recommend them – though better appreciated retrospectively than in the moment – to which my response is a hearty “no, thanks.” But just as books have taken me to deserts and the frozen north, miles above or below the earth, into many eras and cultures, they’ve long been my window onto motherhood.
Matrescence, a word coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s, is the process of becoming a mother. It’s a transition period, like adolescence, that involves radical physical and mental changes and has lasting effects. And as Lucy Jones reports, up to 45% of women describe childbirth as traumatic. That’s not a niche experience; it’s an epidemic. If it was men going through this, you can bet it would be at the top of international research agendas.
These three memoirs (and a bonus novel) are bold, often harrowing accounts of the metamorphosis involved in motherhood. They’re personal yet political in how they expose the lack of social support for creating and raising the next generation. All four of these 2023 releases are eye-opening, lyrical and vital; they deserve to be better known.
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
Like Jones’s previous book, Losing Eden, about climate breakdown and the human need for nature, Matrescence is a potent blend of scientific research and stories from the frontline. She has synthesized a huge amount of information into a tight 260-some pages that are structured thematically but also proceed roughly chronologically through her own matrescence. Not long into her pregnancy with her first child, a daughter, she realised the extent to which outdated and sexist expectations still govern motherhood: concepts like “natural childbirth” and “maternal instinct,” the judgemental requirement for exclusive breastfeeding, the idea that a parent should “enjoy every minute” of their offspring’s babyhood rather than admitting depression or overwhelm. After the cataclysm of birth, loneliness set in. “Matrescence was another country, another planet. I didn’t know how to talk about the existential crisis I was facing, or the confronting, encompassing relationship I was now in.”
Jones is now a mother of three. You might think delivery would get easier each time, but in fact the birth of her second son was worst, physically: she had to go into immediate surgery for a fourth-degree anal sphincter tear. In reflecting on her own experiences, and speaking with experts, she has become passionate about fostering open discussion about the pain and risk of childbirth, and how to mitigate them. Women who aren’t informed about what they might go through suffer more because of the shock and isolation. There’s the medical side, but also the equally important social implications: new mothers need so much more practical and mental health support, and their unpaid care work must be properly valued by society. “Yet the focus remains on individual responsibility, maintaining the illusion that we are impermeable, impenetrable machines, disconnected from the world around us.”
The hybrid nature of the book is its genius. A purely scientific approach might have been dry; a social history well-trod and worthy; a memoir too inward-looking to make wider points. Instead it’s equally committed to all three purposes. I appreciated the laser focus on her own physical and emotional development, but the statistical and theoretical context gives a sense of the universal. The literary touches – lists and word clouds, verse-like meditations and flash vignettes about natural phenomena – are not always successful, but there is a thrill to seeing Jones experimenting. Like Leah Hazard’s Womb, this is by no means a book that’s just for mothers; it’s for anyone who’s ever had a mother.
With thanks to Allen Lane (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Milk: On Motherhood and Madness by Alice Kinsella
Kinsella is an Irish poet who became a mother in her mid-twenties; that’s young these days. In unchronological vignettes dated in relation to her son’s birth – the number of months after; negative numbers to indicate that it happened before – she explores her personality, mental health and bodily experiences, but also comments more widely on Irish culture (the stereotype of the ‘mammy’; the only recent closure of Magdalene laundries and overturning of anti-abortion laws) and theories about motherhood.
I liked this most when the author stuck close to her own sensory and emotional life; overall, the book felt too long and I thought a late segue into an argument against the dairy industry was unnecessary. Had I been the editor, I would have cut the titled essays and just stuck to the time-stamped pieces. At its best, though, this is a poetic engagement with the tropes and reality of motherhood, sometimes delivered in paragraphs that more closely resemble verse:
+1 I have become the common myth. Mother. The sleepy hum of early memories. The smell of shampoo, of Olay, of lavender. The feeling of safety. The absence of fear.
+2 There’s a possibility,
that we are among the happiest
people in the world:
mothers.[Record freeze preserve.] Fighting death by reproducing our days. Fighting death by reproducing. Here: your life on paper. Here: their life to come.
We’re expected to be mothers the instant we lock eyes with our baby. To shed everything we were and be reborn: Madonnas.
The baby’s favourite thing to do is sit on my lap and interact with other people. This is what mothers are for, I think. Comfort, security, a place to get to know the world from.
The language is gorgeous, and while Kinsella complains of disorientation to the point of worrying about losing herself (although she had struggled with mental health earlier in life, the subtitle’s reference to ‘madness’ seemed to me like overkill compared to other memoirs I’ve read of postpartum depression, trauma or psychosis, such as Inferno by Catherine Cho and Birth Notes by Jessica Cornwell), she comes across as entirely lucid. Her goal here is to find and add to the missing literature of motherhood, in much the same way that Jazmina Barrera, another young mother and writer, attempted with Linea Nigra. This would also make a good companion read to A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
Kinsella is among my predictions for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist, along with Eliza Clark (Penance) and Tom Crewe (The New Life). (Public library)
The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir by Kirsty Logan
I’ve read one of Kirsty Logan’s novels and dipped into her short stories. I immediately knew her parenting memoir would be up my street, but wondered how her fantasy/horror style might translate into nonfiction. Second-person narration is perfect for describing her journey into motherhood: a way of capturing the bewildering weirdness of this time but also forcing the reader to experience it firsthand. It is, in a way, as feminist and surreal as her other work. “You and your partner want a baby. But your two bodies can’t make a baby together. So you need some sperm.” That opening paragraph is a jolt, and the frank present-tense storytelling carries all through.
To start with, Logan’s wife Annie tried getting pregnant. They had a known sperm donor and did home insemination, then advanced to IVF. But after three miscarriages and a failed cycle, they took a doctor’s advice and switched to the younger womb – Logan’s, by four years. As “The Planning” makes way for “The Growing,” it helps that Annie knows exactly what she’s going through. The pregnancy sticks, though the fear of something going wrong never abates, and after the alternating magic and discomfort of those nine months (“You’ve reached the ‘shoplifting a honeydew’ stage”) it’s time for “The Birth,” as horrific an account as I’ve read. The baby had shifted to be back-to-back, which required an emergency C-section, but before that there was a sense of total helplessness, abandonment to unmanaged pain.
Finally the doctor comes. She asks what you would like, and you, shaking shitting pissing bleeding, unable to see when the pain reaches its peak, not screaming, not swearing, not being rude to anyone, not begging for an epidural, … say: I’d like to try some gas and air, if that’s okay, please.
What is remarkable is how Logan recreates this time so intensely – she took notes all through the pregnancy, plus on her phone in hospital and in the early days after bringing the baby home – but can also see how, even in the first hours, she was shaping it into a narrative. “You like that it’s a story. You like that it’s Gothic and gory … and funny.” Except it wasn’t. “You thought you were going to die.” And yet. “How can the lucid, everyday world explain this? The wonder, the curiosity, the recognition. The baby has lived inside your body, and you’ve only just met. The baby is your familiar, and deeply unfamiliar.”
This reminded me of other memoirs I’ve read about queer family-making, especially small by Claire Lynch, which similarly turns on the decision about which female partner will carry the pregnancy and is written in an experimental style. The Unfamiliar is utterly absorbing and conveys so much about the author and her family, even weaving in her father’s death seven years before. I’ve signed up for Logan’s online memoir-writing course (“Where to Start and Where to End”) organised by Writers & Artists (part of Bloomsbury) for next month.
With thanks to Virago Press for the free copy for review.
And, as a bonus, a short novel that deals with many of these same themes:
Reproduction by Louisa Hall
Procreation. Duplication. Imitation. All three connotations are appropriate for the title of an allusive novel about motherhood and doppelgangers. A pregnant writer starts composing a novel about Mary Shelley and finds the borders between fiction and (auto)biography blurring: “parts of her story detached themselves from the page and clung to my life.” The first long chapter, “Conception,” is full of biographical information about Shelley and the writing and plot of Frankenstein, chiming with Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout, which I read last year. It’s a recognisable piece of autofiction, moving with Hall from Texas to New York to Montana to Iowa as she marries, takes on various university teaching roles and goes through two miscarriages and then, in the “Birth” section, the traumatic birth of her daughter, after which she required surgery and blood transfusions.
These first two sections are exceptional. There’s a sublime clarity to them, like life has been transcribed to the page exactly as it was lived. The change of gears to the third section, “Science Fiction,” put me off, and it took me a long time to get back into the flow. In this final part, the narrator reconnects with a friend and colleague, Anna, who is determined to get pregnant on her own and genetically engineer her embryos to minimise all risk. Here she is more like a Rachel Cusk protagonist, eclipsed by another’s story and serving primarily as a recorder. I found this tedious. It all takes place during Trump’s presidency [Laura F. told me I accidentally published with that saying pregnancy – my brain was definitely saturated with the topic after these reads!] and the Covid pandemic, heightening the strangeness of matrescence and of the lengths Anna goes to. “What, after all, in these end times we lived in, was still really ‘natural’ at all?” the narrator ponders. She casts herself as the narrating Walton, and Anna as Dr. Frankenstein (or sometimes his monster), in this tale of transformation – chosen or not – and peril in a country hurtling toward self-implosion. It’s brilliantly envisioned, and – almost – flawlessly executed. (Public library)
Additional related reading:
Notes Made while Falling by Jenn Ashworth
After the Storm by Emma Jane Unsworth
And coming out in 2025: Mother, Animal by Helen Jukes (Elliott & Thompson)
Preposterous #NovNov23 Catch-Up Post
I have a big pile of novellas I read last month but never wrote about, plus a few more I’ve sneaked in by finishing them over the past couple of days. I tweaked my shoulder last weekend and the discomfort has moved into my neck, making daily life, and sleep, difficult. A taste of what it’s like to live with chronic pain, I suppose. Add in the freezing temperatures of recent days and I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for myself and haven’t succeeded in sitting at a computer for the time required to write at least a bit about these short books. But as today is the day our link-up finishes, I’m tucked up in bed with laptop, electric blanket, heater, cat, cup of tea and ice pack, ready to do all 16 the best justice I can through a paragraph each.
Fiction:
In the Sweep of the Bay by Cath Barton (2020)
Susan put this on my radar and I bought it in publisher Louise Walters Books’ closing-down sale. Set in Morecambe, this bittersweet story of a half-century marriage and the figures on its margins – co-workers, children, even strangers – is both ambitious and intimate. Ted and Rene Marshall marry in the 1950s and soon drift into drudgery and traditional gender roles; “They forgot the happiness. Or rather, they pushed it away.” While Ted becomes a celebrated ceramics designer in the family company, Rene stagnates at home. It is not so much suspected infidelity as simply taking each other for granted that threatens their relationship. Barton moves through the decades and varies the perspective, letting us hear from one of the Marshalls’ daughters and giving kind attention to a gay couple. Strictly Come Dancing fans and those familiar with the northwest might take particular pleasure, but I enjoyed this quiet book reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s French Braid and (though less political) Jonathan Coe’s Bournville. (New purchase) [104 pages] 
The Visitor by Maeve Brennan (2000)
This posthumous novella was written in the 1940s but never published in Brennan’s lifetime. From Dublin, she was a longtime New Yorker staff member and wrote acclaimed short stories. After her mother’s death, Anastasia King travels from Paris, where the two set up residence after leaving her father, to Ireland to stay in the family home with her grandmother. Anastasia considers it a return, a homecoming, but her spiteful grandmother makes it clear that she is an unwelcome interloper. Mrs King can’t forgive the wrong done to her son, and so won’t countenance Anastasia’s plan to repatriate her mother’s remains. Rejection and despair eat away at Anastasia’s mental health (“She saw the miserable gate of her defeat already open ahead. There only remained for her to come up to it and pass through it and be done with it”) but she pulls herself together for an act of defiance. Most affecting for me was a scene in which we learn that Anastasia is so absorbed in her own drama that she does not fulfill the simple last wish of a dying friend. This brought to mind James Joyce’s The Dead. (Secondhand purchase – The Bookshop, Wigtown) [81 pages] 
Bear by Marian Engel (1976)
If you’ve heard of this, it’ll be for the fact that the main character – Lou, a librarian sent to archive the holdings of an octagonal house on an island one summer – has sex with a bear. That makes it sound much more repulsive and/or titillating than it actually is. The further I read the more I started to think of it as an allegory for women’s awakening; perhaps the strategy inspired Melissa Broder’s The Pisces (stuffed full of sex with a merman). “I have an odd sense of being reborn,” Lou writes to her boss, the Institute director, with whom she’d been having an affair. The bear lives in an outbuilding and at first Lou is indifferent, only feeding him as necessary. Then he becomes a friend, joining her for swims. Then he comes into the house. Bestiality is a taboo for a reason, but what mostly bothers me is the lack of mutuality, the sense of taking advantage. I’m also wary of stories in which animals have a primarily instrumental or metaphorical role. Still, this was a solid read, offbeat and nearly as shocking today as when it first appeared. (Secondhand purchase online) [167 pages]
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (2023)
Several of us reviewed this for #NovNov though unsure it counts: in the UK the title story (originally for the New Yorker) was published in a standalone volume by Faber, while the U.S. release includes two additional earlier stories; I read the latter. The title story has Cathal spending what should have been his wedding weekend moping about Sabine calling off their engagement at the last minute. It’s no mystery why she did: his misogyny, though not overt, runs deep, most evident in the terms in which he thinks about women. And where did he learn it? From his father. (“The Long and Painful Death” is from Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, and concerns a woman on a writing residency at an author’s historic house in Ireland. She makes a stand for her own work by refusing to cede place to an entitled male scholar. The final story is “Antarctica,” the lead story in that 1999 volume and a really terrific one I’d already experienced before. It’s as dark and surprising as an early Ian McEwan novel.) Keegan proves, as ever, to be a master at portraying emotions and relationships, but the one story is admittedly slight on its own, and its point obvious. (Read via Edelweiss) [64 pages]
Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy (1993)
“She is Europe’s eerie child, and she is part of the storm.” J.K. is a young woman who totes her typewriter around different European locations, sleeps with various boyfriends, hears strangers’ stories, and so on. Many of the people she meets are only designated by an initial. By contrast, the most fully realized character is her mother, Lillian Strauss. The chapters feel unconnected and the encounters within them random, building to nothing. Though a bit like Crudo, this has very little detail to latch onto and so was pretentious in its opacity. I’ve generally gotten on much better with Levy’s nonfiction (see below) than her fiction. This, along with the Keegan (above), was my chosen train entertainment for the Booker Prize evening. I got so little out of it that it seemed like wasted reading time. Here’s a decent excerpted passage: “The arrogance of metaphor when facts save people’s lives. The succour of metaphor when facts inadequately describe people’s lives.” (Public library) [83 pages] 
Nonfiction:
Starting with two from the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series, a great source of short monographs. These have been among my favourites so far.
Grave by Allison C. Meier (2023)
Meier is a cemetery tour guide in Brooklyn, where she lives. She surveys American burial customs in particular, noting the lack of respect for Black and Native American burial grounds, the Civil War-era history of embalming, the increasing popularity of cremation, and the rise of garden cemeteries such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which can serve as wildlife havens. The mass casualties and fear of infection associated with Covid-19 brought back memories of the AIDS epidemic, especially for those in New York City. Meier travels to a wide range of resting places, from potter’s fields for unclaimed bodies to the most manicured cemeteries. She also talks about newer options such as green burial, body composting, and the many memorial objects ashes can be turned into. I’m a dedicated reader of books about death and so found this fascinating, with the perfect respectful and just-shy-of-melancholy tone. It’s political and philosophical in equal measures. (Read via NetGalley) [168 pages] 
Pregnancy Test by Karen Weingarten (2023)
Laboratory pregnancy tests have been available since the 1930s and home pregnancy tests – the focus here – since the 1970s. All of them work by testing urine for the hormone hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin). What is truly wild is that pregnancy used to be verifiable only with laboratory animals – female mice and rabbits had to be sacrificed to see if their ovaries had swelled after the injection of a woman’s urine; later, female Xenopus toads were found to lay eggs in response, so didn’t need to be killed. Home pregnancy kits were controversial and available in Canada before the USA because it was thought that they could be unreliable or that they would encourage early abortions. Weingarten brings together the history, laypeople-friendly science, and cultural representations (taking a pregnancy test is excellent TV shorthand) in a readable narrative and makes a clear feminist statement: “the home pregnancy test gave back to women what should have always been theirs: first-hand knowledge about how their bodies worked” and thus “had the potential to upend a paternalistic culture.” (Read via NetGalley) [160 pages]
And from a different Bloomsbury series for monographs about seminal albums, 33 1/3:
Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson (2019)
The dc Talk album Jesus Freak (1995) is the first CD I ever owned. My best friend and I listened to it (along with Bloom by Audio Adrenaline and Take Me to Your Leader by Newsboys) so many times that we knew every word and note by heart. So it’s hard for me to be objective rather than nostalgic; I was intrigued to see what two secular academics would have to say. Crucially, they were teenage dc Talk fans, now ex-Evangelicals and homosexual partners. As English professors, their approach is to spot musical influences (Nirvana on the title track; R&B and gospel elsewhere), critically analyse lyrics (with “Colored People” proving problematic for its “neoliberal multiculturalism and its potential for post-racial utopianism”), and put a queer spin on things. For those who don’t know, dc Talk were essentially a boy band with three singers, one Black and two white – one of these a rapper. Stockton and Gilson chronicle the confusion of living with a same-sex attraction they couldn’t express as teens, and cheekily suggest there may have been something going on between dc Talk members Toby McKeehan and Michael Tait, who were roommates at Liberty University and apparently dismantled their bunk beds so they could sleep side by side. Hmmm! I was interested enough in the subject matter to overlook the humanities jargon. (Birthday gift from my wish list last year) [132 pages] 
And the rest:
Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach (1994)
Grumbach died last year at age 104. This was my third of her books; I read two previous memoirs, Extra Innings and The Presence of Absence, when they were brought back into print as Open Road Media e-books. I knew of Grumbach through her association with May Sarton, and the two in fact had a lot in common, including lesbianism, living in Maine and writing about older age. I was expecting something on a par with Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, one of my favourite books, but this fell short in comparison. Grumbach spent a month and a half alone in Maine during the winter of 1993 while her partner, Sybil, was away amassing stock for their bookstore. The book is a collection of unconnected meditations about nature, the cold, creativity and so on. She finds herself writing fiction so the characters can keep her company, and notes “how much more I was aware of my vices.” Although she tries to avoid the news, word reaches her of acquaintances’ demises, and she recalls the recent death from AIDS of a young local man. Amusingly, she rereads Bear (see above) during the 50 days. Some atmosphere, but low on insight. (Secondhand purchase – Wonder Book and Video, Hagerstown) [114 pages]
Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing by Deborah Levy (2013)
It feels like I made an error by reading Levy’s “Living Autobiography,” out of order. I picked up the middle volume of the trilogy, The Cost of Living, for #NovNov in 2021 and it ended up being my favourite nonfiction read of that year. I then read part of the third book, Real Estate, last year but set it aside. And now I’ve read the first because it was the shortest. It’s loosely structured around George Orwell’s four reasons for writing: political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm. The frame story has her flying to Majorca at a time when she was struggling with her mental health. She vaguely follows in the footsteps of George Sand and then pauses to tell a Chinese shopkeeper the story of her upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa and the family’s move to London. Although I generally admire recreations of childhood and there are some strong pen portraits of minor characters, overall there was little that captivated me here and I was too aware of the writerly shaping. (Secondhand purchase – 2nd & Charles, Hagerstown) [111 pages]
The Private Life of the Hare by John Lewis-Stempel (2019)
I reviewed a couple of JLS’s species-specific monographs for #NovNov in 2018: The Secret Life of the Owl and The Glorious Life of the Oak. There’s a similar range of material here: anatomy, natural history and cultural significance, including in poetry. There are chapters on hunting, the hare as food, and its appearances in myth and religion. I was engaged about half of the time; I tended to skip over longer excerpts from historical documents. The reliance on lengthy quotations and use of bullet points make it feel like a half-finished research project, with the kind of information you could find anywhere else. Too many of his recent books have felt like they were rushed into print. I would only pick this up if you’re particularly fascinated by hares. (Public library) [99 pages]
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (1980)
I’ve read so many cancer stories that it takes a lot to make one stand out. This feels like a random collection of documents rather than a coherent memoir. One of the three essays was originally a speech, and two were previously printed in another of her books. Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and had a mastectomy. A Black lesbian feminist, she resisted wearing prostheses and spoke up about the potential environmental causes of breast cancer that need to be addressed in research (“I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2”). Her actual journal entries make up little of the text, which is for the best because fear and pain can bring out the cliches in us – but occasionally a great quote like “if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.” Another favourite line: “Pain does not mellow you, nor does it ennoble, in my experience.” I’m keen to read her memoir Zami. (University library) [77 pages]
A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar (2019)
I’d not read Matar before I spotted this art book-cum-memoir and thought, why not. A Libyan American novelist who lives in London, Matar had long been fascinated by the Sienese School of painting (13th to 15th centuries), many of whose artists depicted biblical scenes or religious allegories – even though he’s not a Christian. He spent a month in Italy immersed in the art he loves; there are 15 colour reproductions here. His explications of art history are generalist enough to be accessible to all readers, but I engaged more with the glimpses into his own life. For instance, he meets a fellow Arabic speaker and they quickly form a brotherly attachment, and a Paradise scene gives him fanciful hope of being reunited with his missing father – the subject of his Folio Prize-winning memoir The Return, which I’d like to read soon. His prose is beautiful as he reflects on history, death and how memories occupy ‘rooms’ in the imagination. A little more interest in the art would have helped, though. (Little Free Library) [118 pages] 
A Childhood in Scotland by Christian Miller (1981)
I had high hopes for this childhood memoir that originally appeared in the New Yorker and was reprinted as part of the Canongate Classics series. But I soon resorted to skimming as her recollections of her shabby upper-class upbringing in a Highlands castle are full of page after page of description and dull recounting of events, with few scenes and little dialogue. This would be of high historical value for someone wanting to understand daily life for a certain fraction of society at the time, however. When Miller’s father died, she was only 10 and they had to leave the castle. I was intrigued to learn from her bio that she lived in Newbury for a time. (Secondhand purchase – Barter Books) [98 pages]
Here and Now: Living in the Spirit by Henri J.M. Nouwen (1994)
This collection of micro-essays under themed headings like “Living in the Present” and “Suffering” was a perfect introduction to Nouwen’s life and theology. The Dutch Catholic priest lived in an Ontario community serving the physically and mentally disabled, and died of a heart attack just two years after this was published. I marked out many reassuring or thought-provoking passages. Here’s a good pre-Christmas one:
“God became a little child in the midst of a violent world. Are we surprised by joy or do we keep saying: ‘How nice and sweet, but the reality is different.’ What if the child reveals to us what is really real?”
I was taken by the ideas that the life of compassion is one of “downward mobility” and that inner freedom only comes when you don’t judge anyone. He encourages readers to not live in a past of shame and regret, but to be grateful for opportunities for God’s mercy and guidance. Very peaceful and readable; a good bedside devotional book. (Free from my stepfather) [175 pages] 
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1897)
My only reread for the month. Wilde wrote this from prison. No doubt he had a miserable time there, but keeping in mind that he was a flamboyant dramatist and had an eye to this being published someday, this time around I found it more exaggerated and self-pitying than I had before. “Suffering is one very long moment. … Where there is sorrow there is holy ground,” he writes, stating that he has found “harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.” He says he’s not going to try to defend his behaviour … but what is this but one extended apologia and humble brag, likening himself to a Greek tragic hero (“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion”) and even to Christ in his individuality as well as in his suffering at the hands of those who don’t understand him (the scene where he was pilloried consciously mimics a crucifixion tableau). As a literary document, it’s extraordinary, but I didn’t buy his sincerity. He feigns remorse but, really, wasn’t sorry about anything, merely sorry he got caught. (Free from a neighbour) [151 pages]
Original rating (2011):
Rating now:
Average:
Which of these have you read?
And which do you want to read? (You may choose no more than 4!)
In total, I read 27 novellas this November – close to my 2021 record of 29. The highlights included the Barton, Meier, Nouwen and Weingarten above plus Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, but the best of the lot was Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain.
Coming right up, final statistics on the month’s participants and posts!
Review Catch-Up: Monica, Bibliomaniac, Family Meal, Fudge & More
I’m catching up with reviews of the many October releases I read, including these four sent by publishers…
- a genre-bending, Technicolor graphic novel in the form of short comics
- a book-addict’s memoir of an ambitious Covid-times tour of Britain’s bookshops
- an understated novel about queer men of colour coping with death and mental illness
- and a quirky contemporary poetry collection I read in one sitting.
Followed by a bonus list of October books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness, similarly varied in genre: autofiction, flash fiction, horror-tinged historical fiction, graphic memoirs and more.
Monica by Daniel Clowes
Daniel Clowes is a respected American graphic novelist best known for Ghost World, which was adapted into a 2001 film starring Scarlett Johansson. I’m not sure what I was expecting of Monica. Perhaps something closer to a quiet life story like Alison by Lizzy Stewart? In any case, not this jumble of 1970s nostalgia and supernatural horror. The book is in nine loosely connected stories that make the head spin with their genre and tonal shifts; one thing that stays constant is Clowes’s drawing style, which combines vibrant, campy colour with exaggerated faces and blunt haircuts.
At first it seems there will be a straightforward linear narrative: the prologue, “Foxhole,” has two soldiers dreaming of what life will be like Vietnam, with the one looking forward to a simple life with his fiancée Penny. “Pretty Penny” shatters those illusions as we see that Penny has fully embraced sexual liberation while he’s been away. She rejects her mother and, in a countercultural decision, keeps the baby when she gets pregnant. Young Monica has a sequence of stepfather figures before Penny dumps her with her parents and goes AWOL.
To an extent, the rest of the book is about Monica’s search for her parents. We see her as a young college student communicating with her dead grandfather via a radio, as a successful entrepreneur selling candles, and as an older woman caretaking for a California Airbnb. But in between there are bizarre sci-fi/folk horror interludes – “The Glow Infernal” and “The Incident” – about unconnected characters, and Monica’s involvement with a cult inevitably turns strange. I couldn’t get past the distasteful story lines or grotesque style. Mostly, I wasn’t convinced that Clowes liked or cared about any of his own characters, so why should I? (This might be Tom Cox’s dream book, but not mine.) I suppose I might try a classic work by Clowes one day, but only if I can be assured that it has more plot and heart.
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain by Robin Ince
Do you know anyone who can buy just one book? Do you know anyone who leaves a bookshop only with what they walked in to buy?
I understand that Robin Ince is a radio personality and comedian who, though holding no formal qualifications, often delivers presentations about science. He was meant to undertake a stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox in the autumn of 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home – he comes across as driven, antsy; positively allergic to boredom – he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops (the oddest venue was a Chinese restaurant; he was speaking to the Plymouth Humanists), over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many favourite places such as Hay-on-Wye, Hungerford (my local indie) and Wigtown. The topic of his previous book was curiosity, which gave him free rein to feature anything that interested him, so no two talks were the same and he incorporated lots of ad hoc book recommendations.
Ince is not just a speaker at the bookshops but, invariably, a customer – as well as at just about every charity shop in a town. Even when he knows he’ll be carrying his purchases home in his luggage on the train, he can’t resist a browse. And while his shopping basket would look wildly different to mine (his go-to sections are science and philosophy, the occult, 1960s pop and alternative culture; alongside a wide but utterly unpredictable range of classic and contemporary fiction and antiquarian finds), I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines:
“A bookshop with a proximity to an interesting graveyard is a fine combination.”
“I like charity bookshops, because I can delude myself into believing that I am committing an altruistic act by purchasing too many books. I am not satisfying my consumer lust – I am digging a well in Uganda.”
“This is one of the wonders of books: the delight of being a species that can chronicle and preserve. I pick up a book from a shelf, and someone who is no more than ash or bone can still change me.”
He’s also refreshingly open-minded, determined not to become a white male dinosaur: he once spent a wonderful year reading only women authors, and gratefully accepts the gift of a Black queer feminist work – at which he knows a younger version of himself would have scoffed. I took lots of notes on shops I hadn’t heard of, but also appreciated the witty asides on British ways and on the rigours and coincidences of the tour. If you liked White Spines, this will be right up your street, though to me this was universal where the Royle was too niche. And it didn’t matter a jot that I was previously unfamiliar with Ince as a public figure.
Bibliomaniac came out in paperback on 5 October. My thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
After the verve of his linked short stories (Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize) and the offbeat tenderness of his debut novel, Memorial, I couldn’t wait for Bryan Washington’s next book. While it’s set in the multicultural Houston of his first book and similarly peopled by young queer men of colour, Family Meal shares the more melancholy edge of Memorial with its focus on bereavement and the habits and relationships that help the characters to cope.
Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.
If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.
The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
“You don’t have to do this alone, says TJ.”
(Kai:) “My mother would say, Cooking is care. The act is the care.”
“Love can be a lot of things though, says Noel. Right? It’s pleasure but it’s also washing the dishes and sorting medication and folding the laundry. It’s picking out what to eat for dinner three nights in a row, even if you don’t want to. And it’s knowing when to speak up, and when to stay quiet, and when, I think, to move on. But also when to fight for it.”
“Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she [Kai’s sister] says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”
There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.
In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.
I wish I could get a copy of this into the hands of Sufjan Stevens…
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead
I read this over a chilled-out coffee at the Globe bar in Hay-on-Wye (how perfect, then, to come across the lines “I know the secret of life / Is to read good books”). Weatherhead mostly charts the rhythms of everyday existence in pandemic-era New York City, especially through a haiku sequence (“The blind cat asleep / On my lap—and coffee / Just out of reach” – a situation familiar to any cat owner). His style is matter-of-fact and casually funny, juxtaposing random observations about hipster-ish experiences. From “Things the Photoshop Instructor Said and Did”: “Someone gasped when he increased the contrast / I feel like everyone here is named Taylor.”
The central piece, “Poem While on Hold with NBA League Pass Customer Support Nov. 17, 2018,” descends into the absurd, but his four hours lost on the phone are reclaimed through his musings on a sport he once played (“I had begun to find meaning in art and music / I was always too cerebral a player anyways … That feeling—of perfect grace and equanimity— / must be what we’re all searching for in this life”) and on life in general. This is poetry that doesn’t feel like poetry, if that makes sense. I have a hunch that it might appeal to readers of David Foster Wallace.
Published by Publishing Genius. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Flowers of Provence by Jamie Beck (Gift books feature): A gorgeous book of photographs, perfect for gardeners, romantics, and armchair travelers. Her still lifes are as detailed and colorful as medieval paintings.
Edith Holler by Edward Carey (forthcoming): A dark fairy tale about a precocious girl confined to her family’s theatre in Norwich, England yet driven to reveal the truth behind her city’s child disappearances. Reminiscent of Dahl, Dickens, and Shakespeare at their goriest.
I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast: A laugh-out-loud-funny tour through her dream journal as well as a brief introduction to dream theory. Delightfully captures the randomness of dream topics and dialogues.
Tremor by Teju Cole: A kaleidoscopic work of autofiction that journeys between the US and Nigeria as it questions the ownership and meaning of Black art. The sophisticated structure is a highlight of this elegant study of art criticism, suffering, and subjectivity.
Our Strangers by Lydia Davis (Review and Q&A): In her ninth collection of mostly flash-length stories (a whopping 143 of them), an overarching theme is the mystery of human communication and connection. A real cornucopia of genres, structures, and voices. [Only available via Bookshop.org and independent bookstores.]
Lotería by Esteban Rodríguez: Lotería is a traditional Mexican game of chance. Each Spanish-language card is allotted a one-page poem in a creative, poignant recounting of his Mexican American family history.
Glass Half Empty by Rachael Smith: The British comics artist third graphic memoir is a refreshingly candid account of her recovery from alcoholism after her father’s death. In some panes, her adult self appears alongside her younger self, offering advice.
The Dead Peasant’s Handbook by Brian Turner: The final installment – after The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem – in an intimate, autobiographical trilogy. Love is presented as the key to surviving bereavement and wartime trauma.
Alone by Daniel Schreiber (Blog Tour)
Daniel Schreiber is a Berlin-based essayist and biographer of Susan Sontag. These philosophical reflections on solitude and loneliness, coinciding with the first year of the pandemic, reveal his ambivalence about living alone and his frustration that the idea of the couple so defines society that anyone who does not fall in line is considered aberrant.
“I never made a conscious decision to live alone,” Schreiber says. Although he has had many partners, some of them long term, and even lived with two of them for a time, he is single at the time of writing, and can’t help but think that his state implies some kind of deficiency. Part of this he attributes to queer shame that he must have subconsciously internalized, and part to Pauline Boss’s concept of the “ambiguous loss” – missing what one has never had.
The author has many friends, men and women, but feels that society tells us platonic love is less than romantic love; “friendship is thus reduced to a time of transition … a threshold state that ends when one successfully integrates into traditional forms of cohabitation.” His friend novelist Hanya Yanagihara (who gives a quote on the cover) corroborates this suspicion, which A Little Life affirms: “In the end, she said, you are always alone when you are single.”
The “Never So Lonely” chapter is about the Covid-19 situation in particular. Schreiber acknowledges that being alone does not have to equate to loneliness, yet the less he saw of people during lockdowns, the more he struggled mentally and emotionally. “At some point, a self-reinforcing dynamic of fear set in: the lonelier I felt, the less I could talk about it. And the less I talked about it, the lonelier I felt.”
Hiking, gardening, yoga and, eventually, foreign travel were among his coping strategies. This is as much a mini-memoir as it is a work of cultural criticism. Its academic tone is evident from a glance at the bibliography: Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Joan Didion, Deborah Levy, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson and so on. This resonated with other loneliness- or solitude-themed books I’ve read, such as The Lonely City by Olivia Laing and Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. It offers not answers, but solemn, quiet thoughts.
(Original publication: 2021. Translated from the German by Ben Fergusson.)
With thanks to Reaktion Books for the proof copy for review.
20 Books of Summer, 18–20: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Sarah Hall, Meghan O’Rourke
Whew, it’s the final day of the challenge and I’ve managed to finish and write up a last batch of two novels and one nonfiction work: a magic realist tableau of love and death in Trinidad, a fateful romance set against the backdrop of the construction of an English dam in 1936, and a personal and cultural record of chronic illness and its treatment in contemporary America.
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (2022)
I was sent a copy as part of the McKitterick Prize shortlist. The setting of a cemetery, Fidelis in Port Angeles, Trinidad, had vaguely attracted me even before its nomination. Emmanuel Darwin has turned his back on his Rastafarian upbringing to cut off his dreadlocks and work as a gravedigger (any contact with the dead is anathema in the religion). Meanwhile, Yejide, who lives in the hills, is losing her mother, Petronella, and gaining a legacy she’s not sure she wants: the women of her family are caretakers of the souls of the dead, keeping them alive in exchange for protection. Like the corbeaux, dark counterparts of tropical parrots, they tread the border of life and death. As All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days draw closer, Darwin and Yejide together have to decide whether they will be swallowed by the graveyard or escape it. While this was atmospheric and had alluring elements, the speculative angle was not notably well realized and the particular form of patois – eschewing all possessives and most verb conjugations – drove me nuts. I skimmed this one. (Free from the Society of Authors) 
Haweswater by Sarah Hall (2002)
I bought this in Cumbria one year and started reading it in Cumbria the next. Once I got home, however, there was little impetus to keep going. Were it not for the temporary local interest, I likely would not have finished this debut novel, which lurches between dry and melodramatic. As it is, I had to skim to the end. Had it been my first taste of Sarah Hall’s work, it might have put me off trying her again.
The frame is historical: Haweswater was indeed dammed to provide water for the city of Manchester in 1936, flooding the village of Mardale. Hall focuses on the people of Mardale, specifically the Lightburn family, who have persisted with farming despite its particular challenges in this hilly landscape. When Jack Liggett comes out from the City on behalf of the waterworks, he meets with hostility, including from the Lightburns’ daughter, Janet, who negotiates for their tenancy to continue until the dam is actually built. Then, well, you know, Romeo and Juliet and pride and prejudice and all that, and they start an affair. Hall has always written forthrightly about sex, starting here.
There’s a climactic final 60 pages in which three major characters die, two in symbolic acts of suicide, but it was a little too much tragedy, too late, for me after the dull midsection. I was intrigued, however, that a plot point turns on golden eagles being in the valley, as Wild Fell, another of my Haweswater-set reads, opens with the presence of the ghost of England’s last golden eagle, who vanished in 2015. This related snippet shows how over-the-top Hall’s use of dialect is: “Golden eagles wud be mor’less gone, gone or illegal these days, like, notta funni bizniz t’be gittin’ mixed up in, eh? What kinda daft bugger d’yer take mi for?” It’s like Thomas Hardy rustics – hard to take seriously. (Anne-Marie Sanderson’s haunting song “Haweswater” is based on the novel.) (Secondhand – Clutterbooks, Sedbergh, 2022) 
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (2022)
Well before I was a devoted follower of the Barbellion Prize for books on disability and chronic illness, I was interested in these topics. For much of her forties and fifties, my mother struggled with fibromyalgia, one of a suite of illnesses misunderstood or even dismissed by the medical profession (as O’Rourke puts it, with a tongue-in-cheek nod to Jane Austen: “it is a truth universally acknowledged among the chronically ill that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick”). I hope this National Book Award nominee goes some way toward convincing skeptics that these are real conditions to be addressed by listening to patients and treating them holistically.
In 2012 the author became seriously ill and spent much of her thirties in a fog of pain, spending the equivalent of several days per month at doctors’ appointments and agreeing to ever more bizarre treatments in her desperation. Some of her issues were autoimmune and/or genetic: Hashimoto’s (thyroid), Ehlers-Danlos, POTS, endometriosis. She also dealt with infertility at the same time as she was trying to get well enough to contemplate having children. For her, the turning point was when she was diagnosed with Lyme disease and put on antibiotics. (Later she would travel to London to get fecal microbiota transplants to restore her microbiome.) Chronic Lyme is similar to long COVID, the true extent of which we’re only just beginning to understand; reading a list of the symptoms, I was tempted to remotely/retrospectively diagnose a few people I know with one or the other. It can be ever so slightly miserable reading about navigating all of these conditions, though nowhere near as miserable as it must have been for O’Rourke to live through them, of course.
I knew the author for her exquisite memoir of losing her mother to cancer, The Long Goodbye. Here the writing is more functional and journalistic, but I was still impressed by the attention she pays and the connections she draws; she’s also a poet, so she’s open to emotions and keen to capture them in words. In the face of the unexplained, she contends, chronically ill people are searching for meaning and narrative (restitution, chaos or quest, as Arthur Frank named the three options). She probes her own psyche: “had I become trapped in my identity as a sick person, someone afraid of living? If my mission in life had been reduced to being well at all costs, then the illness had won.” There’s a good balance of research, personal experience and general reflection in this one. (Passed along by Laura – thank you!) 
Related reads: Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick, It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan, Waiting for Superman by Tracie White
And that’s a wrap! My summer reading was a little scattered and not as thematic as initially planned, but I stuck to my pledge to read only print books that I owned, and then cleared half of them from my shelves through reselling or donating to the Little Free Library. I’ll definitely call that a win.
My favourite from the 20 was a novel, Search by Michelle Huneven, then Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke (poetry), followed by two chef’s memoirs, A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain and Dirt by Bill Buford, and Dorthe Nors’ nature/travel essays. The one DNF and couple of skims are unfortunate, but these things happen.
Next year I fancy a completely open challenge – just, again, getting through books from my shelves. (Maybe all hardbacks?)
August Releases: Bright Fear, Uprooting, The Farmer’s Wife, Windswept
This month I have three memoirs by women, all based on a connection to land – whether gardening, farming or crofting – and a sophomore poetry collection that engages with themes of pandemic anxiety as well as crossing cultural and gender boundaries.
My August highlight:
Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan
Chan’s Flèche was my favourite poetry collection of 2019. Their follow-up returns to many of the same foundational subjects: race, family, language and sexuality. But this time, the pandemic is a lens through which all is filtered. This is particularly evident in Part I, “Grief Lessons.” “London, 2020” and “Hong Kong, 2003,” on facing pages, contrast Covid-19 with SARS, the major threat when they were a teenager. People have always made assumptions about them based on their appearance or speech. At a time when Asian heritage merited extra suspicion, English was both a means of frank expression and a source of ambivalence:
“At times, English feels like the best kind of evening light. On other days, English becomes something harder, like a white shield.” (from “In the Beginning Was the Word”)
“my Chinese / face struck like the glow of a torch on a white question: / why is your English so good, the compliment uncertain / of itself.” (from “Sestina”)
At the centre of the book, “Ars Poetica,” a multi-part collage incorporating lines from other poets, forms a kind of autobiography in verse. Chan also questions the lines between genres, wondering whether to label their work poetry, nonfiction or fiction (“The novel feels like a springer spaniel running off-/leash the poem a warm basket it returns to always”).
The poems’ structure varies, with paragraphs and stanzas of different lengths and placement on the page (including, in one instance, a goblet shape). The enjambment, as you can see in lines I’ve quoted above and below, is noteworthy. Part III, “Field Notes on a Family,” reflects on the pressures of being an only child whose mother would prefer to pretend lives alone rather than with a female partner. The book ends with hope that Chan might be able to be open about their identity. The title references the paradoxical nature of the sublime, beautifully captured via the alliteration that closes “Circles”: “a commotion of coots convincing / me to withstand the quotidian tug-/of-war between terror and love.”
Although Flèche still has the edge for me, this is another excellent work I would recommend even to those wary of poetry.
Some more favourite lines, from “Ars Poetica”:
“What my mother taught me was how
to revere the light language emitted.”
“Home, my therapist suggests, is where
you don’t have to explain yourself.”
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.
Three land-based memoirs:
(All: )
Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden by Marchelle Farrell
This Nan Shepherd Prize-winning memoir shares Chan’s attention to pandemic-era restrictions and how they prompt ruminations about identity and belonging. Farrell is from Trinidad but came to the UK as a student and has stayed, working as a psychiatrist and then becoming a wife and mother. Just before Covid hit, she moved to the outskirts of Bath and started rejuvenating her home’s large and neglected garden. Under thematic headings that also correspond to the four seasons, chapters are named after different plants she discovered or deliberately cultivated. The peace she finds in her garden helps her to preserve her mental health even though, with the deaths of George Floyd and so many other Black people, she is always painfully aware of her fragile status as a woman of colour, and sometimes feels trapped in the confining routines of homeschooling. I enjoyed the exploration of postcolonial family history and the descriptions of landscapes large and small but often found Farrell’s metaphors and psychological connections obvious or strained.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days by Helen Rebanks
I fancied a sideways look at James Rebanks (The Shepherd’s Life and Wainwright Prize winner English Pastoral) and his regenerative farming project in the Lake District. (My husband spotted their dale from a mountaintop on holiday earlier in the month.) Helen Rebanks is a third-generation farmer’s wife and food and family are the most important things to her. One gets the sense that she has felt looked down on for only ever wanting to be a wife and mother. Her memoir, its recollections structured to metaphorically fall into a typical day, is primarily a defence of the life she has chosen, and secondarily a recipe-stuffed manifesto for eating simple, quality home cooking. (She paints processed food as the enemy.)
Growing up, Rebanks started cooking for her family early on, and got a job in a café as a teenager; her mother ran their farm home as a B&B but was forgetful to the point of being neglectful. She met James at 17 and accompanied him to Oxford, where they must have been the only student couple cooking and eating proper food. This period, when she was working an office job, baking cakes for a café, and mourning the devastating foot-and-mouth disease epidemic from a distance, is most memorable. Stories from travels, her wedding, and the births of her four children are pleasant enough, yet there’s nothing to make these experiences, or the telling of them, stand out. I wouldn’t make any of the dishes; most you could find a recipe for anywhere. Eleanor Crow’s black-and-white illustrations are lovely, though.
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.
Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands by Annie Worsley
I’d come across Worsley in the Wildlife Trusts’ Seasons anthologies. For a decade she has lived on Red River Croft, in a little-known pocket of northwest Scotland. In word pictures as much as in the colour photographs that illustrate this volume, she depicts it as a wild land shaped mostly by natural forces – also, sometimes, manmade. From one September to the next, she documents wildlife spectacles and the influence of weather patterns. Chronic illness sometimes limited her daily walks to the fence at the cliff-top. (But what a view from there!) There is more here about local history and ecology than any but the keenest Scotland-phile may be interested to read. Worsley also touches on her upbringing in polluted Lancashire, and her former academic career and fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Her descriptions are full of colours and alliteration, though perhaps a little wordy: “Pale-gold autumnal days are spliced by fickle and feisty bouts of turbulent weather. … Sunrises and sunsets may pour with cinnabar and henna; dawn and dusk can ripple with crimson and purple.” The kind of writing I could appreciate for the length of an essay but not a whole book.
With thanks to William Collins for the free copy for review.
Would you read one or more of these?
The Best Books from the First Half of 2023
Yes, it’s that time of year already! It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year list, but for now, these are my 20 highlights. Plus, I sneakily preview another great novel that won’t release until September. (For now I’m highlighting 2023 releases, whereas at the end of the year I divide my best-of lists into current year and backlist. I’ve read 86 current-year releases so far and am working on another 20, so I’m essentially designating a top 20% here.) I give review excerpts and link to the full text from this site or elsewhere. Pictured below are the books I read in print; all the others were e-copies.
Fiction
Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman: In 16 sumptuous historical stories, outsiders and pioneers face disability and prejudice with poise. The flash entries crystallize moments of realization, often about health. Longer pieces shine as their out-of-the-ordinary romances have space to develop. In the novella Casting Grand Titans, a botany professor in 1850s Iowa learns her salary is 6% of a male colleague’s. She strives for intellectual freedom, reporting a new-to-science species of moss, while working towards liberation for runaway slaves.
The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland: Moving at a propulsive pace, Beanland’s powerful second novel rotates through the perspectives of these main characters – two men and two women; two white people and two enslaved Black people – caught up in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811 (one of the deadliest events in early U.S. history) and its aftermath. Painstakingly researched and full of historical detail and full-blooded characters, it dramatizes the range of responses to tragedy and how people rebuild their lives.
The New Life by Tom Crewe: Two 1890s English sex researchers (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) write a book called Sexual Inversion drawing on ancient Greek history and containing case studies of homosexual behaviour. Oscar Wilde’s trial puts everyone on edge; not long afterwards, their own book becomes the subject of an obscenity trial, and each man has to decide what he’s willing to give up in devotion to his principles. This is deeply, frankly erotic stuff, and, on the sentence level, just exquisite writing.
Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt: (Yes, another historical fire novel, and I reviewed both for Shelf Awareness!) This engrossing debut explores the options for women in the mid-19th century. Metaphorical conflagrations blaze in the background in the days leading up to the great Nantucket fire of 1846: each of three female protagonists (a whaling captain’s wife, a museum curator, and a pregnant Black entrepreneur) holds a burning secret and longs for a more expansive, authentic life. Tense and sultry; for Sue Monk Kidd fans.
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai: When an invitation comes from her boarding school alma mater, Granby, to teach a two-week course on podcasting, Bodie indulges her obsession with the 1995 murder of her former roommate. Makkai has taken her cues from the true crime genre and constructed a convincing mesh of evidence and theories. She so carefully crafts her pen portraits, and so intimately involves us in Bodie’s psyche, that it’s impossible not to get invested. This is timely, daring, intelligent, enthralling storytelling.
Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain: In this debut collection of 22 short stories, loosely linked by their location in the Appalachian hills in western Pennsylvania and a couple of recurring minor characters, McIlwain softens the harsh realities of addiction, poverty and violence with the tender bruises of infertility and lost love. Grief is a resonant theme in many of the stories, with pregnancy or infant loss a recurring element. At times harrowing, always clear-eyed, these stories are true to life and compassionate about human foibles and animal pain.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: Oprah’s 100th book club pick. It’s a family story spanning three decades and focusing on the Padavanos, a working-class Italian American Chicago clan with four daughters. Julia meets melancholy basketball player William Waters while at Northwestern in the late 1970s. There is such warmth and intensity to the telling, and brave reckoning with bereavement, mental illness, prejudice and trauma. I love sister stories in general, and the subtle echoes of Leaves of Grass and Little Women add heft.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld: Through her work as a writer for a sketch comedy show modelled on Saturday Night Live, Sally Milz meets Noah Brewster, a pop star with surfer-boy good looks. Plain Jane getting the hot guy – that never happens, right? In fact, Sally has a theory about this very dilemma… As always, Sittenfeld’s inhabiting of a first-person narrator is flawless, and Sally’s backstory and Covid-lockdown existence endeared her to me. Could this be called predictable? Well, what does one want from a romcom?
In Memoriam by Alice Winn: Heartstopper on the Western Front; swoon! Will Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt both acknowledge that this is love and not just sex, as it is for so many teenage boys at their English boarding school? And will one or both survive the trenches of the First World War? Winn depicts the full horror of war, but in between there is banter, friendship and poetry. Some moments are downright jolly. This debut is obsessively researched, but Winn has a light touch with it. Engaging, thrilling, and, yes, romantic.
A bonus:
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (Riverhead/Hutchinson Heinemann, 12 September): Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel. (Review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness.)
Nonfiction
All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett: A lovely memoir about grief and gardening, caring for an ill child and a dying parent. The book is composed of dozens of brief autobiographical, present-tense essays, each titled after a wildflower with traditional healing properties. The format realistically presents bereavement and caring as ongoing, cyclical challenges rather than one-time events. Sitting somewhere between creative nonfiction and nature essays, it’s a beautiful read for any fan of women’s life writing.
Monsters by Claire Dederer: The question posed by this hybrid work of memoir and cultural criticism is “Are we still allowed to enjoy the art made by horrible people?” It begins, in the wake of #MeToo, by reassessing the work of film directors Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. The book is as compassionate as it is incisive. While there is plenty of outrage, there is also much nuance. Dederer’s prose is forthright and droll; lucid even when tackling thorny issues. Erudite, empathetic and engaging from start to finish.
Womb by Leah Hazard: A wide-ranging and accessible study of the uterus, this casts a feminist eye over history and future alike. Blending medical knowledge and cultural commentary, it cannot fail to have both personal and political significance for readers of any gender. The thematic structure of the chapters also functions as a roughly chronological tour of how life with a uterus might proceed: menstruation, conception, pregnancy, labour, caesarean section, ongoing health issues, menopause. Inclusive and respectful of diversity.
Sea Bean by Sally Huband: Stories of motherhood, the quest to find effective treatment in a patriarchal medical system, volunteer citizen science projects, and studying Shetland’s history and customs mingle in a fascinating way. Huband travels around the archipelago and further afield, finding vibrant beachcombing cultures. In many ways, this is about coming to terms with loss, and the author presents the facts about climate crisis with sombre determination. She writes with such poetic tenderness in this radiant debut memoir.
Marry Me a Little by Robert Kirby: Hopping around in time, this graphic memoir tells the story of how the author and his partner John decided to get married in 2013. The blue and red color scheme is effective at evoking a polarized America and the ebb and flow of emotions, with blue for calm, happy scenes and concentrated red for confusion or anger. This is political, for sure, but it’s also personal, and it balances those two aims well by tracing the history of gay marriage in the USA and memorializing his own relationship.
All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer: In 2019, Vollmer’s mother died of complications of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Months later, his father reported blinking lights in the woods near the family cemetery. Although Vollmer had left the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in college, his religious upbringing influenced his investigation, which overlapped with COVID-19. Grief, mysticism, and acceptance of the unexplained are resonant themes. An unforgettable record of “a collision with the ineffable.”
Eggs in Purgatory by Genanne Walsh: This autobiographical essay tells the story of the last few months of her father’s life. Aged 89, he lived downstairs from Walsh and her wife in San Francisco. He was quite the character: idealist, stubborn, outspoken; a former Catholic priest. Although he had no terminal conditions, he was sick of old age and its indignities and ready to exit. The task of a memoir is to fully mine the personal details of a situation but make of it something universal, and that’s just what she does here. Stunning.
Poetry
More Sky by Joe Carrick-Varty: In this debut collection, the fact of his alcoholic father’s suicide is inescapable. The poet alternates between an intimate “you” address and third-person scenarios, auditioning coping mechanisms. His frame of reference is wide: football, rappers, Buddhist cosmology. The word “suicide” itself is repeated to the point where it becomes just a sibilant collection of syllables. The tone is often bitter, as is to be expected, but there is joy in the deft use of language.
Lo by Melissa Crowe: This incandescent autobiographical collection delves into the reality of sexual abuse and growing up in rural poverty. Guns are insidious, used for hunting or mass shootings. Trauma lingers. “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t / be shaken loose.” The collection is so carefully balanced in tone that it never feels bleak. In elegies and epithalamiums (poems celebrating marriage), Crowe honors family ties that bring solace. The collection has emotional range: sensuality, fear, and wonder at natural beauty.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris: This debut collection addresses the symptoms and side effects of breast cancer treatment at age 36, but often in oblique or cheeky ways – it can be no mistake that “assistance” appears two lines before a mention of haemorrhoids, for instance, even though it closes an epithalamium distinguished by its gentle sibilance (Farris’s husband is Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky.) She crafts sensual love poems, and exhibits Japanese influences. (Review forthcoming at The Rumpus.)
The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly: Kelly is half-Danish and has single-sided deafness, and her second collection engages with questions of split identity. One section ends with the Deaf community’s outrage that the Prime Minister’s Covid briefings were not translated into BSL. Bizarre but delightful is the sequence of alliteration-rich poems about fungi, followed by a miscellany of autobiographical poems full of references to colour, nature and travel.
What are some of the best books you’ve read so far this year?
What 2023 releases should I catch up on right away?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
