Best Books of 2024: My Top 20
I’m keeping it simple again this year with one post covering all genres: these are the 20 current-year releases that stood out the most for me. (No rankings.) Those that aren’t repeated from my Best Books from the First Half of 2024 post didn’t quite make the cut but should be considered as runners-up well worth your time. Unsurprisingly, health is a common theme across many of my selections, especially as it touches women’s lives. Pictured below are the books I read in print; the others were all electronic copies. Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down: The Graphic Novel by Sarah Airriess: The thrilling opening to a cinematically vivid adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir. He was an assistant zoologist on Robert Falcon Scott’s perilous 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. The book resembles a full-color storyboard for a Disney-style maritime adventure film. There is jolly camaraderie as the men sing sea shanties to boost morale. The next volume can’t arrive soon enough.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: This nuanced debut alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and time travel sci-fi, making clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress. The narrator is a “bridge” helping to resettle a Victorian polar explorer in near-future London. You just have to suspend disbelief and go with it. Bradley’s descriptive prose is memorable but never quirky for the sake of it. I haven’t had so much fun with a book since Romantic Comedy. A witty, sexy, off-kilter gem.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj: Darraj’s novel-in-stories is a shimmering composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. Each of the stories (four in the first person, five in the third person) spotlights a particular character. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s.
Clear by Carys Davies: Depicts the Highland Clearances in microcosm though Ivar, last resident of a remote Scottish island between Shetland and Norway. John is a minister sent by the landowner to remove Ivar. Mary, John’s wife, journeys from the mainland to rescue him. Davies writes striking scenes that bring the island scenery to life. Her deceptively simple prose captures the slow building of emotion and moments that change everything. For a trio that seemed on course for tragedy, there is the grace of a happier ending.
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell: A poet and academic (who both is and is not Greenwell) endures a Covid-era medical crisis that takes him to the brink of mortality and the boundary of survivable pain. Over two weeks, we become intimately acquainted with his every test, intervention, setback and fear. Experience is clarified precisely into fluent language that also flies far above a hospital bed, into a vibrant past, a poetic sensibility, a hoped-for normality. I’ve never read so remarkable an account of what it is to be a mind in a fragile body.
Wellness by Nathan Hill: A state-of-the-nation story filtered through one Chicago family experiencing midlife and marital crises: underperforming academic Jack; his wife Elizabeth, a placebo researcher at Wellness; and their YouTube-obsessed son Toby. They’ve recently invested their life savings in a new condo. The addictive and spot-on novel asks questions about authenticity, purpose, and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? Hill is clearly fascinated with psychological experimentation but also questions it to humorous effect.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: Twenty- and thirtysomethings having lots of sex, yes, but now a solemn tone: Characters’ suffering and failures have deepened their thinking, sense of self, and ability to feel for others. Peter and Ivan lost their father to cancer; Sylvia is in chronic pain after an accident; Naomi is evicted and aimless; Margaret is ashamed of having an estranged alcoholic husband. Chess is a clever metaphor for their interactions; the depiction of grief rings true. A stylistic leap forward, too. Her best, most mature work by a mile.
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck: A dozen stories form a “hook-and-chain” formation of five couplets, bookended by a first and last story related to each other. Links are satisfyingly overt: A pair takes place in the same New England house in different centuries; a companion piece fills in the history of the characters from the previous. All are historically convincing, and the very human themes of lust, parenthood, sorrow and frustrated ambition resonate across centuries and state lines. Really beautiful (and better than North Woods).
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang (illus. LeUyen Pham): A super-cute teen graphic novel with gorgeous illustrations prioritizing pink and red to suit the theme. We follow Vietnamese American Valentina through high school as she plays host to an internal debate between cynicism and romanticism. Ever since her mother left, she’s longed to believe in romance but feared that love is a doomed prospect for her family. The Asian community of Oakland, California and a new hobby of lion dancing provide engrossing cultural detail.
Nonfiction
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s Manhattan apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell. Throughout, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell’s death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti: Heti put 10 years of diary contents into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence, and then ruthlessly culled the results. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of her oeuvre: obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity, but also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding chronology. Amazingly, the collage approach produces a genuine, crystalline vision of the self. A sui generis work of life writing.
Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom by Pam Houston: If you’re going to read a polemic, make sure it’s as elegantly written and expertly argued as this one. Houston responds to the overturning of Roe v. Wade with 60 micro-essays – one for each full year of her life – about what it means to be in a female body in a country that seeks to control and systematically devalue women. The cycling of topics makes for an exquisite structure. Houston is among my recommendations for top-notch authors you might not know.
The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain by Nina Lohman: Chronic Daily Headaches: Having a clinical term for extreme pain did nothing to solve it; no treatment Lohman has tried over a decade has helped much either. Medical professionals and friends alike downplay her experience because she is able to pass as well and raise two children. The fragmentary pieces read like poems. Bodily realities defy language, yet she employs words exquisitely. The tone flows from enraged to resigned to cynical and back.
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie: This impassioned auto/biographical collage combines the strengths of oral history, group biography and a fragmented memoir. “Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key. As readers, we watch her life, her thinking and the book all take shape. It’s warm and empathetic, with layers of stories that reflect diversity of experience.
A Termination by Honor Moore: A fascinatingly discursive memoir that circles a 1969 abortion and contrasts societal mores across her lifetime. Moore was a 23-year-old drama student; the termination was “my first autonomous decision,” she insists, a way of saying, “I want this life, not that life.” Family and social factors put her life into perspective. The concise text is composed of crystalline fragments, incorporating occasional second- and third-person narration. The kaleidoscopic yet fluid approach is stunning.
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss: Moss effectively contrasts the would-be happily ever after of generally getting better after eight years of disordered eating with her anorexia returning with a vengeance at age 46. The mood shifts so that what threatens to be slightly cloying in the childhood section turns academically curious and then, somehow, despite distancing pronouns (mostly second- but also some third-person narration), intimate. Shape-shifting, devastating, staunchly pragmatic; a unique model for converting life into art.
Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie: I’ve not had much success with Rushdie’s fiction, but this is excellent, with intriguing side tendrils and many quotable lines. It traces lead-up and aftermath; unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some medical detail about his recovery, you get the sense of him more as an unchanging mind and a resolute will. The most noteworthy section imagines dialogues he might have with the imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations.
Poetry
Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor: Factor’s long, intricate poetry collection showcases the tension between past and present and envisions womanhood as a tug of war between desire and constraint. “Elegy for a Younger Self” poems string together vivid reminiscences. In “Sapphics on Nursing” and elsewhere, romantic friendships edge toward homoeroticism; heterosexual marriage and motherhood represent either delightful intimacy or a snare. Allusion and experience, slant rhymes and wordplay craft a lavish tapestry.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez: This debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming, tornadoes and cicadas. But her Kansas isn’t all rose-tinted nostalgia; there’s an edge of sadness and danger. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. In “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator becomes sinister. She also takes inspiration from headlines. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for.
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick: Motherhood and the body are overarching themes. The speaker has multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own, while another long section is about her husband’s transition. Bird metaphors are inescapable. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is dark humour and one-line rejoinders. If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further.
If I had to choose just one of each? This trio trying out complementary strategies for transmuting life into literature: Small Rain, Alphabetical Diaries and Egg/Shell.
Have you read any of these? Or might you now, based on my recommendation?
#NovNov24 Catch-Up, II: Ingalls; Boas, Lindbergh, Toth
Thanks for indulging me as I assemble a final catch-up of the novella-length works I started in November and didn’t manage to review until now. In fiction, I have a surreal modern classic. And in nonfiction, two books of open-hearted and witty writing on the approach of death, and a memoir with a unique framework.
Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls (1982)
Dorothy Caliban is a California housewife whose unhappy marriage to Fred has been strained by the death of their young son (an allergic reaction during routine surgery) and a later miscarriage. When we read that Dorothy believes the radio has started delivering personalized messages to her, we can’t then be entirely sure if its news report about a dangerous creature escaped from an oceanographic research centre is real or a manifestation of her mental distress. Even when the 6’7” frog-man, Larry, walks into her kitchen and becomes her lover and secret lodger, I had to keep asking myself: is he ever independently seen by another character? Can these actions be definitively attributed to him? So perhaps this is a novella to experience on two levels. Take it at face value and it’s a lighthearted caper of duelling adulterers and revenge, with a pointed message about the exploitation of the Other. Or interpret it as a midlife fantasy of sexual rejuvenation and an attentive partner (“[Larry] said that he enjoyed housework. He was good at it and found it interesting”):
Dorothy still felt like a teenager. At the time when her hope and youth and adventurousness had left her, she had believed herself cheated of those early years when nothing had happened to her, although it might have. Later still, she realized that if she had made an effort, she herself could have made things happen. But now it didn’t matter. Here she was.
I thought of it as a waystation between Bear by Marian Engel and something like Melissa Broder’s novels or All Fours by Miranda July. I enjoyed it well enough but didn’t wholly see what the fuss was all about. (New bargain purchase from Faber) [117 pages] 
A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas (2024)
I hadn’t heard of the author but picked this up from the Bestseller display in my library. It’s a posthumous collection of writings, starting with a few articles Boas wrote for his local newspaper, the Jersey Evening Post, about his experience of terminal illness. Diagnosed late on with incurable throat cancer, Boas spent his last year smoking and drinking Muscadet. Looking back at the privilege and joys of his life, he knew he couldn’t complain too much about dying at 46. He had worked in charitable relief in wartorn regions, finishing his career as director of Jersey Overseas Aid. The articles are particularly witty. After learning his cancer had metastasized to his lungs, he wrote, “The prognosis is not quite ‘Don’t buy any green bananas’, but it’s pretty close to ‘Don’t start any long books’.” While I admired the perspective and equanimity of the other essays, most of their topics were overly familiar for me (gratitude, meditation, therapy, what (not) to do/say to the dying). His openness to religion and use of psychedelics were a bit more interesting. It’s hard to write anything original about dying, and his determined optimism – to the extent of downplaying the environmental crisis – grated. (Public library) [138 pages]
No More Words: A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh by Reeve Lindbergh (2001)
I’ve reviewed one of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s books for a previous NovNov: Gift from the Sea. She was also a poet and aviator. Reeve Lindbergh’s memoir focuses on the last year and a half of her mother’s life, 1999–2001. At this point she was in her early nineties and mostly nonverbal after a series of mini-strokes. She moved to live with her daughter on a Vermont farm and had carers to attend to her daily needs. It’s painful for the whole family to watch someone who was so fond of words gradually lose the ability to communicate. There are still moments of connection and possible memory, as when she reads her mother’s work aloud to her, and even humour, as they eat the messiest possible strawberry shortcake. It is an easy dying: her nurses are gentle and respectful, and she lives significantly longer than anyone predicted. Along the way, we get glimpses of the running of the farm, such as bottle-feeding an abandoned lamb, and of repeated tragedies from the family’s history: the Charles Lindberghs’ first child died in a botched kidnapping attempt at age one, and Reeve also lost a son at a similar age. “It is good just to sit next to my mother, whom I have known and loved for so long,” she writes. These low-key thoughts on age, infirmity and anticipatory grief were nicely done, but won’t likely stay with me. (Secondhand – Barter Books, 2024) [174 pages]
Leaning into the Wind: A Memoir of Midwest Weather by Susan Allen Toth (2003)
I was always going to read this because I’m a big fan of Susan Allen Toth’s work, including her trilogy of cosy travel books about Great Britain. I’m a memoir junkie in general, but I especially like ones that view the self through a particular filter, e.g., garments sewn (Bound by Maddie Ballard), houses lived in (My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster) and train journeys taken (The Lost Properties of Love by Sophie Ratcliffe). Toth grew up in Iowa and, barring stints on the coasts for her degrees, always lived in the Midwest, chiefly Minnesota. “The weather, I have happily discovered, does not grow old” – a perennial conversation starter and source of novel, cyclical experiences. She remembers huddling in a basement during tornado warnings and welcoming the peace of a first snow. Squalls seen out the window seemed to mirror her turbulent first marriage. She would fret over her daughter driving in thunderstorms until her safe arrival home. Fending off insects is a drawback to summer, and keeping a garden is an alloyed joy. I especially liked the essays on the metaphorical use of weather words and the temptation of ascribing meteorological events to divine activity. Not a squeak about climate change, though at the time the general public was aware of it; there could be an update chapter on shifts in seasonality and the increased frequency of extreme weather events. (Birthday gift from my wish list in 2021) [124 pages] 
Final statistics
For this year’s Novellas in November, I reviewed a total of 30 short books, so I achieved my goal of reading the equivalent of one short book for each day of the month! The standouts were (nonfiction) Without Exception by Pam Houston and (fiction) On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, which was a reread for me. Other highlights included The House of Dolls by Barbara Comyns, Recognising the Stranger by Isabella Hammad, and Island by Julian Hanna. I also reviewed a film based on a novella, Small Things Like These.
It was great to get involved with Weatherglass Books in the inaugural year of their Novella Prize by attending their “The Future of the Novella” event in London, reviewing Astraea, and interviewing Neil Griffiths. I’ll review Aerth soon, too.
Collectively, we had 46 participants contributing 188 posts covering 160+ books. If you want to take a look back at the link parties, they’re all here. Another fantastic year – thank you again!
Sandwich by Catherine Newman (Blog Tour)
Catherine Newman’s second novel for adults, Sandwich, takes place during a week on Cape Cod, a popular Massachusetts beach resort. Rachel, nicknamed “Rocky,” is a fiftysomething mother to two young adults, Jamie and Willa. She and her husband Nick have been renting the same cottage for their family’s summer vacations for 20 years. Although Rocky narrates most of the novel in the first person, in the Prologue she paints the scene for the reader in the third person: “They’ve been coming here for so many years that there’s a watercolor wash over all of it now … pleasant, pastel memories of taffy, clam strips, and beachcombing.”
Also present are Maya, Jamie’s girlfriend; Rocky’s ageing parents; and Chicken the cat (can you imagine taking your cat on holiday?!). With such close quarters, it’s impossible to keep secrets. Over the week of merry eating and drinking, much swimming, and plenty of no-holds-barred conversations, some major drama emerges via both the oldies and the youngsters. And it’s not just present crises; the past is always with Rocky. Cape Cod has developed layers of emotional memories for her. She’s simultaneously nostalgic for her kids’ babyhood and delighted with the confident, intelligent grown-ups they’ve become. She’s grateful for the family she has, but also haunted by inherited trauma and pregnancy loss.
There couldn’t be more ideal reading for women in the so-called “sandwich generation” who have children growing towards independence as well as parents starting to struggle with infirmity. (The contemporary storyline of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which coincidentally is about a character named Willa, is comparable in that respect.) Newman is frank about Willa’s lesbianism and Rocky’s bisexuality, and she doesn’t hold back about the difficulties of menopause, either. Rocky is challenged to rethink her responsibilities as a daughter, wife and mother when she’s surrounded by equally strong-willed people who won’t do what she wants them to. The novel is so quirky, funny and relatable that it’s impossible not to sympathize with Rocky even if, like me, you’re in a very different life situation.
I like the U.S. cover so much more!
One observation I would make is that Rocky is virtually identical to Ash in Newman’s debut, We All Want Impossible Things, and to the author in real life (as I know from subscribing to her Substack). If you read even the most basic information about her, it’s clear that it’s all autofiction. That’s not an issue for me as I don’t think inventing is inherently superior to drawing from experience; some authors write what they know in a literal sense and that’s okay. So, for her fans, more of the same will be no problem at all. But it is a very particular voice: intense, scatty, purposely outrageous. Rocky is a protagonist who says things like, “How am I a feminist, an advocate for reproductive rights, Our Bodies, Ourselves, hear me roar, blah blah, and I am only just now learning about vaginal atrophy?” (A companion nonfiction read would be Nina Stibbe’s Went to London, Took the Dog.)
In outlook Newman reminds me a lot of Anne Lamott, who is equally forthright and whose books similarly juxtapose life’s joy and sorrows, especially in this late passage: “this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
This is a sweet, fun, chatty book that’s about a summer break – and would be perfect to read on a summer break.
With thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Doubleday for the free e-copy for review.
Buy Sandwich from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to help close out the blog tour for Sandwich. See below for details of where the other reviews have appeared.
Literary Wives Club: Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown (2019)
{SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW!}
Canadian author Karma Brown’s fifth novel features two female protagonists who lived in the same house in different decades. The dual timeline, which plays out in alternating chapters, contrasts the mid-1950s and late 2010s to ask 1) whether the situation of women has really improved and 2) if marriage is always and inevitably an oppressive force.
Nellie Murdoch loves cooking and gardening – great skills for a mid-twentieth-century housewife – but can’t stay pregnant, which provokes the anger of her abusive husband, Richard. To start with, Alice Hale can’t cook or garden for toffee and isn’t sure she wants a baby at all, but as she reads through Nellie’s unsent letters and recipes, interspersed with Ladies’ Home Journal issues in the boxes in the basement, she starts to not just admire Nellie but emulate her. She’s keeping several things from her husband Nate: she was fired from her publicist job after a pre-#MeToo scandal involving a handsy male author, she’s had an IUD fitted, and she’s made zero progress on the novel she’s supposed to be writing. But Nellie’s correspondence reveals secrets that inspire Alice to compose Recipe for a Perfect Wife.
The chapter epigraphs, mostly from period etiquette and relationship guides for young wives, provide ironic commentary on this pair of not-so-perfect marriages. Brown has us wondering how closely Alice will mirror Nellie’s trajectory (aborting her pregnancy? poisoning her husband?). There were clichéd elements, such as Richard’s adultery, glitzy New York City publishing events, Alice’s quirky-funny friend, and each woman having a kindly elderly (maternal) neighbour who looks out for her and gives her valuable advice. I felt uncomfortable with how Nellie’s mother’s suicide makes it seem like Nellie’s radical acts are borne out of inherited mental illness rather than a determination to make her own path.
Often, I felt Brown was “phoning it in,” if that phrase means anything to you. In other words, playing it safe and taking an easy and previously well-trodden path. Parallel stories like this can be clever, or can seem too simple and coincidental. However, I can affirm that the novel is highly readable and has vintage charm. I always enjoy epistolary inclusions like letters and recipes, and it was intriguing to see how Nellie uses her garden herbs and flowers for pharmaceutical uses. Our first foxglove just came into flower – eek! (Kindle purchase)
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
- Being a wife does not have to mean being a housewife. (It also doesn’t have to mean being a mother, if you don’t want to be one.)
- Secrets can be lethal to a marriage. Even if they aren’t literally so, they’re a really bad idea.
This was, overall, a very bleak picture of marriage. In the 1950s strand there is a scene of marital rape – one of two I’ve read recently, and I find these particularly difficult to take. Alice’s marriage might not have blown up as dramatically, but still doesn’t appear healthy. She forced Nate to choose between her and the baby, and his job promotion in California. The fallout from that ultimatum is not going to make for a happy relationship. I almost thought that Nellie wields more power. However, both women get ahead through deception and manipulation. I think we are meant to cheer for what they achieve, and I did for Nellie’s revenge at Richard’s vileness, but Alice I found brattish and calculating.
See Kate’s, Kay’s and Naomi’s reviews, too!
Coming up next, in September: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
April Releases by Brownrigg, Ernaux, O’Connor, Waterman and Wood
Family history is a common element for the first four of these review books: a multi-generational story (incorporating autofiction in places) about Anglo-American writers and the legacy of suicide; a brief slice of memoir about the loss of a mother; a historical novella inspired by family stories and set on an island at the cusp of war; and a poetry collection drawing on a father’s death as well as on local folklore. Addiction and dementia are specific links between pairs. And to round off, a set of short stories about pregnancy and motherhood.
The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found by Sylvia Brownrigg
“The dead don’t come back, but they are not as far away as you think.”
I knew Brownrigg’s name as a novelist thanks to Susan’s blog (see her review of Pages for Her), but when I read about this family memoir it piqued my interest more than her fiction might have. The Brownrigg clan are nobility (really – her brother has the title “Baronet”) but have rejected conventional Englishness over the past century. First her grandfather, Gawen, separated from his wife and moved to Nairobi to work as a journalist. He also published two obscure novels before dying at age 27. The empty bottle of Nembutal and recent changes to his will suggested suicide, though his mother resisted the notion vociferously. Gawen’s son, Nicholas, was raised in California by his mother, Lucia, and became an alcoholic who lived off-grid on a ranch and had an unpublished Beats-influenced novel.
After Nicholas’s death in 2018, Brownrigg was compelled to trace her family’s patterns of addiction and creativity. It’s a complex network of relatives and remarriages here. The family novels and letters were her primary sources, along with a scrapbook her great-grandmother Beatrice made to memorialize Gawen for Nicholas. Certain details came to seem uncanny. For instance, her grandfather’s first novel, Star Against Star, was about, of all things, a doomed lesbian romance – and when Brownrigg first read it, at 21, she had a girlfriend.
Along with the more traditional memoir sections, there are the documents that speak for themselves and extended passages of autofiction. I loved an imaginary letter by Gawen’s older brother, who died in young childhood, and a third-person segment about Beatrice’s life in England during the Second World War. But I mostly skipped over the 90 lightly fictionalized pages about the author’s (“Sophie’s”) life with her father in California. You might view this as a showcase of possible methods for engaging with family history, some of which work better than others. All of it is fascinating material, though.
Published by Counterpoint in the USA. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the advanced e-copy for review.
A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux (1988; 2024)
[Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie]
This memoir of Ernaux’s mother’s life and death is, at 58 pages, little more than an extended (auto)biographical essay. Confusingly, it covers the same period she wrote about in I Remain in Darkness (originally published nine years later), a diary of her mother’s final years with dementia; I even remembered two specific events and quotes. Why not combine the two into a full-length biographical recollection? Or pair it with A Man’s Place, Ernaux’s memoir of her father, in one volume? Perhaps her works will be repackaged in the future. But this came first: Ernaux started writing just a couple of weeks after her mother’s death, and spent 10 months over it. It’s clear she was determined to salvage what she could of her mother’s life:
It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time … This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. … I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.
Ernaux opens with news of the death, and the funeral. But soon she’s pushing back into the past. Her mother grew up in poverty near Rouen and worked in a factory before her marriage, when she and her husband took on a grocery store and café. The Second World War was in some romantic way the great drama of her life. She was exacting of her daughter: “Her overriding concern was to give me everything she hadn’t had. But this involved so much work, so much worrying about money”. In her widowhood she came to live with Ernaux, who was then divorced with two sons, and tried to find a middle way between independence and connection. Eventually, though, her memory loss required admission to a nursing home.
I’ve felt the same about all three short works I’ve read by Ernaux so far: though precisely observed, they conceal themselves behind emotional distance. So while this might seem similar to A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, I found the latter more engaging.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor
The remote Welsh island setting of O’Connor’s debut novella was inspired by several real-life islands that were depopulated in the twentieth century due to a change in climate and ways of life: Bardsey, St Kilda, the Blasket Islands, and the Aran Islands. (A letter accompanying my review copy explained that the author’s grandmother was a Welsh speaker from North Wales and her Irish grandfather had relatives on the Blasket Islands.)
Eighteen-year-old Manod Llan is the older daughter of a lobster fisherman. Her sweetheart recently left to find work in a mainland factory. It’s 1938 and there are vague rumbles about war, but more pressing is the arrival of strangers here to study a vanishing culture. Anthropologists Edward and Joan learn snatches of Welsh and make recordings of local legends and songs, which are interspersed with the fragmentary narrative. Manod, star-struck, seeks the English researchers’ approval as she helps with translation and other secretarial duties, but becomes disillusioned with their misinterpretations and fascist leanings.
The gradual disintegration of a beached whale casts a metaphorical shadow of decay over the slow-burning story. I kept waiting for momentous events that never came. More definitive consequences? Something to do with Manod’s worries for her little sister, Llinos? A flash-forward to the abandoned island’s after-years? Or to Manod’s future? As it is, the sense of being stuck at a liminal time makes it all feel like prologue. But O’Connor’s writing is quite lovely (“The milk had formed a film over the surface and puckered, like a strange kiss”; “All of my decisions felt like trying to catch a fish that did not exist until I caught it”) and the book is strong on atmosphere and tension. I’ll look out for her next work.
With thanks to Picador for the free copy for review.
Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman
I was most drawn to the poems in Part I, “All but Forgotten,” about his father’s last year or so.
The titles participate in telling the story: “Alcoholic Dementia,” followed by “Twin Oaks Nursing Home.”
The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches.
…
Then what you’ve turned yourself into – half there
on one side of a final single bed
you might not leave till the rest of you has left –
starts, stares through me, says ‘I’m being held
against my will!’, tells a nurse to ‘Just fuck off’
then thanks her. Old boy, when did you get like this?
The sheep-tracks of my mind are worn to trenches.
Then they moved you to a home
that still wasn’t home. ‘Why
am I in this fucking place?
Nothing’s wrong with me.’
So I’d tell you all over again,
but only the easy part (‘You’re
not remembering things well
at present.’ ‘Yes I fucking am’)
and you relearned that you’d
never learn – mindless torture,
until I stopped it. Your
silences were trains departing.
From the miscellany of Part II, I plucked out “Gooseberries” and “Perennials,” both of which conceal emotion among plants. Then Part III, “Lincolnshire Folk Tales,” turns the tone mischievous, with the ABCB end-rhymes of “Yallery Brown,” “The Metheringham Lass,” “The Lincoln Imp,” and “Nanny Rutt” (I felt I’d stumbled on a limerick with its rhythm: “Math Wood is a small plot of trees south of Bourne, / next to McDonald’s and Lidl. / It’s privately owned, full of shot-gun shells, pheasants – / but still, a bit of an idyll”). Plenty of good stuff, then, but it doesn’t all seem to fit together in the same collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Naomi Wood
I requested this because a) I had enjoyed Wood’s novels Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game and b) I couldn’t resist the title. These nine contemporary stories (five in the first person and four in the third person) all feature women who are pregnant and/or mothers of young children. Three dwell on work–life balance in particular, with the female protagonists of “Lesley, in Therapy” and “Dracula at the Movies” an animator and a filmmaker, respectively. The third, “Hurt Feelings,” in which a medical emergency forces a choice between career and motherhood, was my favourite. Claudia is working on an advertising campaign for a large pharmaceutical company whose newest product targets chronic pain. Although she suspects it’s a placebo, she knows how valuable it is for these people to have their pain acknowledged given it’s as invisible as her history of pregnancy loss.
Other highlights included “Peek-a-Boo,” in which pregnant twin sisters fly to Italy to remonstrate with their father, who refuses to cede a holiday flat to the next renters; and “Wedding Day,” about a woman bitter enough to try to sabotage her ex’s big day by demanding he bring their daughter, the flower girl, home by bedtime. “Flatten the Curve” is about restrictions and desires during Covid lockdown. Family, neighbour, and co-worker dynamics fuel the drama. In a few cases, Wood imagined promising situations but didn’t deliver on them. I could hardly believe “Comorbidities,” about a mother who films a sex tape with her husband to distract from her eco-anxiety, won the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award. If Wood was aiming for edgy, she landed on peevish instead. “Dino Moms,” the final story, was worst, with its absurd dinosaur-vet reality-TV setup. Overall, the collection is too one-note because of the obsession with motherhood (“It is not very interesting to be in love with your child; it’s commonplace, this sacrificial love”). Back to novels soon, please.
With thanks to Phoenix (Orion) for the free copy for review.
Does one of these catch your eye? What April releases can you recommend?
New Poetry Releases by Phil Barnett, Victoria Kennefick and Rachel Mann
I was slow off the mark this month, but finally managed to finish a first batch of review copies. The rest from January will be coming up soon.
Birds link the first and second poetry collections below, and the trans experience the second and third. Other themes include chronic illness, miscarriage, motherhood, history, prayer and praise.
Birds Knit My Ribs Together by Phil Barnett
What an evocative title – reminiscent of last year’s You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis by Kelly Weber – and powerful image of how nature has bolstered the author through chronic illness.
The title phrase comes from the poem “Trepanning,” which imagines different species keeping him company in pain. If they’re sometimes held figuratively responsible, they’re also part of the solution; openness to experience means vulnerability, but also solidarity:
a woodpecker bored my skull
in trepanation
drummed a hole and wasps flew out
goldcrests’ needle-calls put punctures
all along the kidney’s line
swallow’s flightlines skywrote my ill
when thrushes sang it out loud
I appreciated the alliteration, the out-of-the-ordinary verbs, and the everyday metaphors. When spring finds Barnett unable to go further than his garden, the birds come to him, inviting him into “a prosecco world, still all winter / stirred in March, shaken in April”. There is highly visual and aural language throughout the book. In “Unsprung,” a dead heron becomes, in an echo of T.S. Eliot, the “still point at the centre of a wheeling world”. Though a pretty niche collection, it’s a lovely little one that nature-lovers should take a chance on.
With thanks to Arachne Press for the free copy for review.
Carcanet have set the bar high for 2024 poetry with these next two releases:
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick
I was blown away by Kennefick’s 2021 debut, Eat or We Both Starve, which I described as “audacious,” “fleshly,” and “pleasingly morbid.” Her sophomore collection is just as strong, with motherhood and the body continuing as overarching themes. The speaker is, by turns, pregnant and mother to a daughter. She experiences multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own (see my recent post on matrescence), while the second long section is about her husband transitioning. This is not actually the first book I’ve read about the changes in a marriage precipitated by a spouse transitioning, and the welter of emotions that it provokes; there’s also Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley in memoir and Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins in poetry.
As in Barnett’s collection, bird metaphors are inescapable. “The Wild Swans at the Wetland Centre” must be a nod to W.B. Yeats (his were at Coole). Here, the recurring chickens and swans are the poet’s familiars, and their eggs her totems – ideal vessels, but so easily broken. The same is true of “Cup,” whose lines form the shape of a teacup perched on a saucer. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is a lot of self-deprecation and dark humour in the poem titles (“Victoria Re-Enacts the Stations of the Cross,” falling and spilling coffee all over herself) and one-line poems that act as rejoinders. (“Orientation: A Tragedy” reads “I am so straight I give myself paper cuts.”)
If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further. I doubt I’ll come across a better collection this year.
More favourite lines:
I get sad as earth becomes sea. I get sad
that in showing you this sinking world
I teach you how to say goodbye.
(from “On Being Two in the Anthropocene”)
I want people
to know me, and to hide.
(from “Le Cygne, My Spirit Animal”)
I want to write down the names of all my dead relatives.
How are they not here anymore? How are yours absent too?
What do we do with them, their names? Is there a box for grief?
(from “Census Night Poem”)
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review. Coming out on 29 February.
Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann
This is Mann’s second collection, after A Kingdom of Love. In reviewing that book I remarked on the psalm-like cadence, the anatomical and allusive language, and the contrast of past and present. All are elements here as well. The first long section was inspired by Eleanor/John Rykener, a 14th-century seamstress and sex worker whom some have claimed as a trans pioneer. Little is known about her life or self-identification, so Mann does not attempt biography here, but rather is thinking alongside the character. “Construct me weird and kind, leave it to me / To strip off when I’m ready. I shall run wild, / Naked as I dare, out into sober streets.”
Three later poems share the title “A Charm to Change Sex,” each numbered and in two columns – you have a choice of whether to read them across or down the page. Either way, they land somewhere between a spell and a prayer (and there are many other prayers in the table of contents): “Hidden: transfix / Invisible made visible … oh so holy, words lead everywhere / inside become out”. Bodies are as provisional as speech (“All text is stitched, / Body too only subset of making, a stored magic”), and inescapably frail, as evidenced by a father’s illness and death, the subject of several poems.
Repetition and wordplay (“razed/raised”) sometimes tail off into faltering phrases – “#TDOR” is most notable for this. And “Seven Proof Texts on a Transitioned Body” is, by itself, worth buying the book for, with alliteration and slang pushing back at medical and scriptural vocabulary. Mann is an incredibly versatile writer: I’ve read a memoir, a work of literary appreciation, and an academic thriller by her as well as her published poetry. And while I found less that resonated in this collection, I still admired its rigorous engagement with history, theology, and the facts of a life.
With thanks to Carcanet Press 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)
Nature Book Catch-Up: Sally Huband, Richard Smyth & Anna Vaught
I’m catching up with a few nature- and travel-based 2023 releases that were sent to me for review. I’ve grouped them together because these British authors share some of the same interests and concerns. They celebrate beloved places that become ours through the time we spend in them and the attention we grant; they mourn the loss of biodiversity from rockpools and gardens and seabird cliffs. What kind of diminished world they’re raising their children into is a major worry for all three, and for Huband and Vaught the unease is exacerbated by chronic illness. Wild creatures, and the fellow authors who have hymned them, ease the hurt.
Sea Bean: A beachcomber’s search for a magical charm by Sally Huband
After more than a decade in her adopted home of Shetland, Sally Huband is still a newcomer. A tricky path to motherhood and ensuing chronic illness (the autoimmune disease palindromic rheumatism) limited her mobility and career. Beachcombing is at once her way of belonging to a specific place and feeling part of the wider world – what washes up on a Shetland beach might come from as far away as Atlantic Canada or the Caribbean. Sea glass, lobster pot tags, messages in bottles, driftwood … and a whole lot of plastic, of course. Early on, Huband sets her sights on a sea bean – also known as a drift-seed, from the tropics – which in centuries past was a talisman for ensuring safe childbirth. Possession of one was enough to condemn a 17th-century local woman to death for witchcraft, she learned.
Stories of motherhood, the quest to find effective treatment in a patriarchal medical system, volunteer citizen science projects (monitoring numbers of dead seabirds, returning beached cetaceans to the water, dissecting fulmar stomachs to assess their plastic content), and studying Shetland’s history and customs mingle in a fascinating way. Huband travels around the archipelago and further afield, finding a vibrant beachcombing culture on the Dutch island of Texel. As in Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn, one of my all-time favourite nonfiction books, there is delight at the randomness of what the ocean delivers.
I requested this book because Huband’s was my favourite essay in the Antlers of Water anthology. In it, she deplored the fact that women were still not allowed to participate in the Up Helly Aa fire festival in Lerwick. Good news: that is no longer the case, thanks to campaigning by Huband and others. In a late chapter, she also reports that blackface was recently banned from the festivals, and a Black Lives Matter demonstration drew 2000 people. Change does come, but slowly to a traditional island community. And sometimes it is not the right sort of change, as with an enormous wind farm, resisted vigorously by residents, that will primarily enrich a multinational company instead of serving the local people.
In many ways, this is a book about coming to terms with loss, and Huband presents the facts with sombre determination. Passages about the threats to birds and marine life had me near tears. But she writes with such poetic tenderness that the evocative specifics of island life point towards what’s true for all of us making the best of our constraints. I was lucky enough to visit several islands of Shetland in 2006; whether you have or not, this is a radiant memoir I would recommend to readers of Kathleen Jamie, Jean Sprackland and Malachy Tallack.
Some favourite lines:
No island can ever live up to the heightened expectations that we always seem to place on them; life catches up with us, sooner or later.
With each loss, emotional pain accretes for those who have paid attention.
If hope is a hierarchy of wishes then I am happy enough, each time that I beachcomb, to find fragments of the bark of paper birch
I’ve come to think of the ocean as an archive of sorts.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for the proof copy for review.
The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell: Finding Wild Things with My Kids by Richard Smyth
all around us
the stuff of spells. Our parents
let us go to scamper deeper,
leap from stumps lush with moss.
Everything aloof about me
fell into the soil once charged
with younger siblings
and freedoms of a wood.
…
I give you a damp valley floor,
this feather for your pocket.
~an extract from “Arger Fen,” from Latch by Rebecca Goss
I know Richard Smyth for his writing on birds (I’ve reviewed both A Sweet, Wild Note and An Indifference of Birds) and his somewhat controversial commentary on modern nature writing. This represents a change in direction for him toward more personal reflection, and with its focus on the phenomena of childhood and parenthood it recalls Wild Child by Patrick Barkham and The Nature Seed by Lucy Jones and Kenneth Greenway. But, as I knew to expect from previous works, he has such talent for reeling in the tangential and extrapolating from the concrete to the abstract that this lively read ends up being about everything: what it is to be human on this fading planet.
And this despite the fact that four of five chapter headings suggest pandemic-specific encounters with nature. Lockdown walks with his two children, and the totems they found in different habitats – also including a chaffinch nest and an owl pellet – are indeed jumping-off points, punctuating a wide-ranging account of life with nature. Smyth surveys the gateway experiences, whether books or television shows or a school tree-planting programme or collecting, that get young people interested; and talks about the people who beckon us into greater communion – sometimes authors and celebrities; other times friends and family. He also engages with questions of how to live in awareness of climate crisis. He acknowledges that he should be vegetarian, but isn’t; who does not harbour such everyday hypocrisies?
It’s still, unfortunately, rare for men to write about parenthood (and especially pregnancy loss – I only think of Native by Patrick Laurie and William Henry Searle’s books), so it’s great to see that represented, and it’s a charming idea that we create “downfamily” because the “upfamily” doesn’t last forever. Although there’s nostalgia for his childhood here, and anxiety about his kids’ chances of seeing wildlife in abundance, Smyth doesn’t get mired in the past or in existential dread. He has a humanist belief that people are essentially good and can do positive things like build offshore wind farms, and in the meantime he will take Genevieve and Daniel into the woods to play so they will develop a sense of wonder at all that lives on. Even for someone like me who doesn’t have children, this was a captivating, thought-provoking read: We’re all invested in the future of life on this planet.
With thanks to Icon Press for the free copy for review.
These Envoys of Beauty: A Memoir by Anna Vaught
Anna Vaught is a versatile author: I have a copy of her mental health-themed novel Saving Lucia, longlisted for the inaugural Barbellion Prize, on the shelf; she’s written a spooky set of stories, Famished (see Susan’s review); and I gave some early reader feedback on the opening pages of her forthcoming work of quirky historical fiction, The Zebra and Lord Jones. She’s also publishing a book on writing, and editing a collection of pieces submitted for the first Curae Prize for writers who are also carers. I was drawn to her first nonfiction release by reviews by fellow bloggers – it’s always good when a blog tour achieves its aim!
These dozen short essays are about how nature doesn’t necessarily heal, but is a most valued companion in a life marked by chronic illness and depression. The evocative title and epigraphs are from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836). The pieces loop through Vaught’s past and present, focussing on favourite places in Wiltshire, where she lives, and at the Pembrokeshire coast. It’s the second memoir about complex PTSD that I’ve read this year (see also What My Bones Know). Both at the time and now, when flashbacks of her parents’ verbal and physical abuse haunt her, lying down in a grassy field, exploring a sea cave or sucking on a gorse flower could be a salve. “Nature offered stability and satisfying detail; pattern, form and things that made sense.”
Vaught has a particular love for trees, flowers and moss – even just reciting their Latin names gives her a thrill, and she adds additional information about some species in footnotes. Although her childhood was painful, she retains gratitude for its wide-eyed wonder, and in the exuberance of her prose you can sense a willed childlike perspective (“But back to the list of clouds and writing about clouds!”). I found the frequent self-referential nature of the essays and direct reader address a little precious, but appreciated the thoughts about how nature holds us: “I have always felt a generosity around me, and that I was less lonely outside; at the very least, I could find something to comfort me”. She’s a bookish kindred spirit as well. I’ll be sure to try her work in other genres.
With thanks to Reflex Press for the free copy for review.
Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain (Blog Tour)
I’m a sucker for “dirty realism,” a term coined in the 1980s to encompass gritty stories of blue-collar Americana: Ron Rash, David Vann, Daniel Woodrell et al. (I wrote a whole article about it in 2013). It’s less common, certainly, to find women writing in this subgenre, and that feminine touch is part of what makes Sidle Creek unique. 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, Jolene McIlwain softens the harsh realities of addiction, poverty and violence with the tender bruises of infertility and lost love.
The title story, which opens the book, has a shifting first-person point-of-view, first telling us about and then putting us into the mind of Esme Andersen, who’s 20 in 1975. Various diagnoses have plagued her family, medical words that repeat as chants: hemorrhage, endometriosis. Superstitions around the creek cast it alternately as a potential site of harm or healing as her single father tries to help her deal with her severe periods. The cover image comes from “Shell,” in which Tiller Shanty reads signs in the markings on red-winged blackbird eggs. He learned his skill of divination from his Vietnamese wife, but conceals from her a portent about her future. It turns out there’s more than one way to lose a beloved.
Grief is a resonant theme in so many of the stories. “The Fractal Geometry of Grief” is a shining example. Hubert Ashe, a widowed mathematician, becomes obsessed with a doe and sets up trail cams and a feeding station to watch her. It’s not clear whether he believes the animal is a reincarnation of his wife or not, but it’s unwise to get so attached in a hunting area. In “Seeds,” a man finds a photograph of his dying wife as a girl and revisits the sadness of her life. “Steer,” one of the most affecting stories, has a middle-aged man hit by anxiety, unable to forget the death of one of their cattle back when he was 16. As horrific as the experience was, it made him receptive to both beauty and pain.
Animal suffering is indeed frequent – something that seems important to mention, as I know a lot of readers who avoid scenes of it whenever possible. In “Eminent Domain,” the electricity shed where teenagers used to go drinking is found to be full of slaughtered cats. It’s the prompt the protagonist needs to escape this dead-end town. “Loosed” is a masterpiece in the vein of Demon Copperhead (though much more violent) about a man who makes money on increasingly cruel sport: cock fighting, then dog fighting, then dirty fights between his own four sons. The flash forward that ends this one is devastating. I, too, am sensitive to reading about animal deaths, but the animal suffering only matches the human here. The nastiness of “The Less Said” makes that plain.
Pregnancy or infant loss is a recurring element. In just three pages, “Seed to Full” expresses a world of sorrow as a woodworker crafts a coffin for his infant son. Even where it is not a central subject, infertility is mentioned in a number of stories. In “You Four Are the One,” four adolescent neighbor girls help Cinta Johns out around the house, hoping with her that this fifth pregnancy will be the one that lasts. “The Steep Side,” a memorable closer that shifts between past and future, has a teen coming across a crashed van, a heavily pregnant woman, and an older woman claiming to be a nurse. What he sees haunts him into adulthood.
There’s an air of mystery to that one, and particularly in “Those Red Boots,” about the disappearance of a waitress who worked at a Hooters-style joint where all the comely staff wear the same uniforms and perform titillating dances. My preference was for longer stories like this where you get greater depth of characterization and more scenes and dialogue. I might have considered cutting a handful of the flash-length stories. However, even in these micro-fictions, there are still interesting setups. My favorite among them was “The Fourth,” in which Independence Day fireworks are triggering for shell-shocked Uncle Ron.
At times harrowing, always clear-eyed, these stories are true to life and compassionate about human foibles and animal pain. I would highly recommend them to readers of Kent Haruf and Jayne Anne Phillips. McIlwain has such an established voice that this hardly seems like a first book. I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next.
With thanks to Melville House for the proof copy for review.
Buy Sidle Creek from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to be invited to participate in the blog tour for Sidle Creek. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will be appearing soon.
April Releases: Frida Kahlo, Games and Rituals, Romantic Comedy
It’s been a big month for new releases and I have loads more April books on the go or waiting in the wings to be reviewed in catch-up posts in the future. For now, I have a biographical graphic novel about a celebrated painter whose medical struggles coloured her art, a set of witty short stories about modern preoccupations and relationships, and a guilty pleasure of a novel from one of my favourite contemporary authors.
Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Work, Her Home by Francisco de la Mora
[Translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel]
The latest in SelfMadeHero’s Art Masters series (I’ve also reviewed their books on Munch, Van Gogh, Gauguin and O’Keeffe). De la Mora imagines Kahlo (1907–1954) hosting a party at her famous blue house in Coyoacán, Mexico in her final summer – unknown to everyone there, it’s exactly one week before her death. “Hola, come in, welcome. I’m so glad you’re all here. Today is my birthday, and I want to tell all of you the story of my life…” she invites her guests, and thereby the reader. It’s a handy conceit that justifies a chronological approach.
I was reminded of traumatic events from Kahlo’s life that I’d already encountered in various places (such as Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black): childhood polio and the Mexican Revolution, the hideous bus accident that reshaped her body, and two miscarriages. Periods of confinement alternate with travels. We see her devotion to traditional dress and the development of her frank self-portraiture style. I’d forgotten, or never knew, that she married Diego Rivera twice and divorced in between. They hosted many cultural giants of the time (e.g., Trotsky’s stay with them forms part of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna), and both had their infidelities. I loved the use of vibrant colours, but learned little. This is really only an introduction for those new to her.
With thanks to Paul Smith and SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny
Early Morning Riser was one of my favourite books of 2021, and I caught up earlier this year with Heiny’s only previous novel, Standard Deviation. Both are hilarious takes on the quirks of relationships, exploring a specific dynamic that recurs in a couple of these stories: the uncomfortable triangle between a man, his second (invariably younger) wife, and the very different, generally formidable, woman he was formerly married to and who continues to play a role in his life. One of the strongest stories is “561,” which was first published as a stand-alone e-book in 2018. Charlie stole Forrest away from Barbara and now the two women have a frosty relationship. It might seem like poetic justice that Charlie later has to load all of Barbara’s possessions into a moving van, but the notion of penance gets murkier when we learn what happened when they worked together on a suicide prevention hotline.
Eight of the 11 stories are in the third person and most protagonists are young or middle-aged women navigating marriage/divorce and motherhood. A driving examiner finds herself in the same situation as her teenage test-taker; a wife finds evidence of her actor husband’s adultery. In “Damascus,” Mia worries her son might be on drugs, but doesn’t question her own self-destructive habits. Inspired by Marie Kondo, Rachel tries to pare her life back to the basics in “CobRa.” In “King Midas,” Oscar learns that all is not golden with his mistress. “Sky Bar” has Fawn stuck in her hometown airport during a blizzard. I particularly liked the ridiculous situations Florida housemates get themselves into in “Pandemic Behavior,” and the second-person “Twist and Shout,” about loving an elderly father even though he’s infuriating.
Heiny mixes humour with bitter truths in engaging stories about characters whose mistakes and futile attempts to escape the past only make them the more relatable. Her first and last lines are particularly strong; who could resist a piece that opens with “Your elderly father has mistaken his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eaten it”?
With thanks to 4th Estate for the proof copy for review.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld is one of my favourite contemporary authors (I’ve also reviewed You Think It, I’ll Say It and Rodham) and I’ve read everything she’s published. Her work might seem lighter than my usual fare, but I’ve always maintained that she, like Maggie O’Farrell, perfectly treads the line between literary fiction and women’s fiction. This was one of my most anticipated releases of the year and it met my expectations.
Sally Milz is a mid-thirties writer for The Night Owls, a long-running sketch comedy show modelled on Saturday Night Live. Sittenfeld clearly did a lot of research into women in comedy, and Chapter 1 is a convincing blow-by-blow of a typical TNO schedule of pitches, edits, rehearsals, all-nighters and afterparties. This particular week in 2018, the host and musical guest are the same person: Noah Brewster, a pop star with surfer-boy good looks who rose to fame in the early 2000s with radio singles like “Making Love in July” and has maintained steady popularity since then. (I imagined him as a cross between Robbie Williams and Chris Hemsworth.) Sally had been expecting a self-absorbed ignoramus so, when she helps Noah edit a sketch he’s written, is pleasantly surprised to discover he’s actually smart, funny and humble. Sparks seem to fly between them, too, though the week ends all too soon.
Plain Jane getting the hot guy … that never happens, right? In fact, Sally has a theory about this very dilemma, named after her schlubby TNO office-mate: The Danny Horst Rule states that ordinary men may date and even marry actresses or supermodels, but reverse the genders and it never works. A fundamental lack of confidence means that, whenever she feels too vulnerable, Sally resorts to snarky comedy and sabotages her chances at happiness. But when, midway through the summer of 2020, she gets an out-of-the-blue e-mail from Noah, she wonders if this relationship has potential in the real world. (This, for me, is the peak: when you find out that interest is requited; that the person you’ve been thinking about for years has also been thinking about you. Whatever comes next pales in comparison to this moment.)
The correspondence section was my favourite element. “I do still wonder whether a person’s writing self is their realest self, their fakest self, or just a different self than their in-the-world self?” Sally writes to Noah. As always, Sittenfeld’s inhabiting of a first-person narrator is flawless, and Sally’s backstory and Covid-lockdown, Kansas City existence with her octogenarian stepfather and his beagle endeared her to me. I also appreciated that a woman in her mid- to late thirties could be a romantic lead, and that the question of whether she wants children simply never comes up. Of Sittenfeld’s books, I’d call this closest in tone and content to Eligible, and some familiarity with SNL would probably be of benefit.
Could this be called a predictable story? Well, what does one expect or want from a romcom (watching or reading)? There may be a feminist leaning in places, but this is conventional wish fulfilment, which, I assume, is what keeps romance readers hooked. I enjoyed every sentence and, when it was over, wished I could stay in Sally’s world. (See also Susan’s review.)
With thanks to Doubleday for the proof copy for review.
Would you be interested in reading one or more of these?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 