Reading about Mothers and Motherhood: Cosslett, Cusk, Emma Press Poetry, Heti, and Pachico
It was (North American) Mother’s Day at the weekend, an occasion I have complicated feelings about now that my mother is gone. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading and writing about mothering. At first I planned to divide my recent topical reads (one a reread) into two sets, one for ambivalence about becoming a mother and the other for mixed feelings about one’s mother. But the two are intertwined – especially in the poetry anthology I consider below – such that they feel more like facets of the same experience. I also review two memoirs (one classic; one not so much) and two novels (autofiction vs. science fiction).
The Year of the Cat: A Love Story by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (2023)
This was on my Most Anticipated list last year. A Covid memoir that features adopting a cat and agonizing over the question of whether to have a baby sounded right up my street. And in the earlier pages, in which Cosslett brings Mackerel the kitten home during the first lockdown and interrogates the stereotype of the crazy cat lady from the days of witches’ familiars onwards, it indeed seemed to be so. But the further I got, the more my pace through the book slowed to a limp; it took me 10 months to read, in fits and starts.
I’ve struggled to pinpoint what I found so off-putting, but I have a few hypotheses: 1) By the time I got hold of this, I’d tired of Covid narratives. 2) Fragmentary narratives can seem like profound reflections on subjectivity and silences. But Cosslett’s strategy of bouncing between different topics – worry over her developmentally disabled brother, time working as an au pair in France, PTSD from an attempted strangling by a stranger in London and being in Paris on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack – with every page or even every paragraph, feels more like laziness or arrogance. Of course the links are there; can’t you see them?
3) Cosslett claims to reject clichéd notions about pets being substitutes for children, then goes right along with them by presenting Mackerel as an object of mothering (“there is something about looking after her that has prodded the carer in me awake”) and setting up a parallel between her decision to adopt the kitten and her decision to have a child. “Though I had all these very valid reasons not to get a cat, I still wanted one,” she writes early on. And towards the end, even after she’s considered all the ‘very valid reasons’ not to have a baby, she does anyway. “I need to find another way of framing it, if I am to do it,” she says. So she decides that it’s an expression of bravery, proof of overcoming trauma. I was unconvinced. When people accuse memoirists of being navel-gazing, this is just the sort of book they have in mind. I wonder if those familiar with her Guardian journalism would agree. (Public library)
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk (2001)
When this was first published, Cusk was vilified for “hating” her child – that is, for writing honestly about the bewilderment and misery of early motherhood. We’ve moved on since then. Now women are allowed to admit that it’s not all cherubs and lullabies. I suspect what people objected to was the unemotional tone: Cusk writes like an anthropologist arriving in a new land. The style is similar to her novels’ in that she can seem detached because of her dry wit, elevated diction and frequent literary allusions.
I understand that crying, being the baby’s only means of communication, has any number of causes, which it falls to me, as her chief companion and link to the world, to interpret.
Have you taken her to toddler group, the health visitor enquired. I had not. Like vaccinations and mother and baby clinics, the notion instilled in me a deep administrative terror.
We [new parents] are heroic and cruel, authoritative and then servile, cleaving to our guesses and inspirations and bizarre rituals in the absence of any real understanding of what we are doing or how it should properly be done.
She approaches mumsy things as an outsider, clinging to intellectualism even though it doesn’t seem to apply to this new world of bodily obligation, “the rambling dream of feeding and crying that my life has become.” By the end of the book, she does express love for and attachment to her daughter, built up over time and through constant presence. But she doesn’t downplay how difficult it was. “For the first year of her life work and love were bound together, fiercely, painfully.” This is a classic of motherhood literature, and more engaging than anything else I’ve read by Cusk. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood, ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (2014)
There’s a great variety of subject matter and tone here, despite the apparently narrow theme. There are poems about pregnancy (“I have a comfort house inside my body” by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi), childbirth (“The Tempest” by Melinda Kallismae) and new motherhood, but also pieces imagining the babies that never were (“Daughters” by Catherine Smith) or revealing the complicated feelings adults have towards their mothers.
“All My Mad Mothers” by Jacqueline Saphra depicts a difficult bond through absurdist metaphors: “My mother was so hard to grasp: once we found her in a bath / of olive oil, or was it sesame, her skin well-slicked / … / to ease her way into this world. Or out of it.” I also loved her evocation of a mother–daughter relationship through a rundown of a cabinet’s contents in “My Mother’s Bathroom Armoury.”
In “My Mother Moves into Adolescence,” Deborah Alma expresses exasperation at the constant queries and calls for help from someone unconfident in English. “This, then, is how you should pray” by Flora de Falbe cleverly reuses the structure of the Lord’s Prayer as she sees her mother returning to independent life and a career as her daughter prepares to leave home. “I will hold you / as you held me / my mother – / yours are the bathroom catalogues / and the whole of a glorious future.”
I connected with these perhaps more so than the poems about becoming a mother, but there are lots of strong entries and very few unmemorable ones. Even within the mothers’ testimonials, there is ambivalence: the visceral vocabulary in “Collage” by Anna Kisby is rather morbid, partway to gruesome: “You look at me // like liver looks at me, like heart. You are familiar as innards. / In strip-light I clean your first shit. I’m not sure I do it right. / It sticks to me like funeral silk. … There is a window // guillotined into the wall. I scoop you up like a clod.”
A favourite pair: “Talisman” by Anna Kirk and “Grasshopper Warbler” by Liz Berry, on facing pages, for their nature imagery. “Child, you are grape / skins stretched over fishbones. … You are crab claws unfurling into cabbage leaves,” Kirk writes. Berry likens pregnancy to patient waiting for an elusive bird by a reedbed. (Free copy – newsletter giveaway)
Motherhood by Sheila Heti (2018)
I first read this nearly six years ago (see my original review), when I was 34; I’m now 40 and pretty much decided against having children, but FOMO is a lingering niggle. Even though I already owned it in hardback, I couldn’t resist picking up a nearly new paperback I saw going for 50 pence in a charity shop, if only for the Leanne Shapton cover – her simple, elegant watercolour style is instantly recognizable. Having a different copy also provided some novelty for my reread, which is ongoing; I’m about 80 pages from the end.
I’m not finding Heti’s autofiction musings quite as profound this time around, and I can’t deny that the book is starting to feel repetitive, but I’ve still marked more than a dozen passages. Pondering whether to have children is only part of the enquiry into what a woman artist’s life should be. The intergenerational setup stands out to me again as Heti compares her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s short life with her mother’s practical career and her own creative one.
For the past month or so, I’ve also been reading Alphabetical Diaries, so you could say that I’m pretty Heti-ed out right now, but I do so admire her for writing exactly what she wants to and sticking to no one else’s template. People probably react against Heti’s work as self-indulgent in the same way I did with Cosslett’s, but the former’s shtick works for me. (Secondhand purchase – Bas Books & Home, Newbury)
A few of the passages that have most struck me on this second reading:
I think that is how childbearing feels to me: a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture.
I don’t want ‘not a mother’ to be part of who I am—for my identity to be the negative of someone else’s positive identity.
The whole world needs to be mothered. I don’t need to invent a brand new life to give the warming effect to my life I imagine mothering will bring.
I have to think, If I wanted a kid, I already would have had one by now—or at least I would have tried.
Jungle House by Julianne Pachico (2023)
{BEWARE SPOILERS}
Pachico’s third novel is closer to sci-fi than I might have expected. Apart from Lena, the protagonist, all the major characters are machines or digital recreations: AI, droids, a drone, or a holograph of the consciousness of a dead girl. “Mother” is the AI security system that controls Jungle House, the Morel family’s vacation home in a country that resembles Colombia, where Pachico grew up and set her first two books. Lena, as the human caretaker, is forever grateful to Mother for rescuing her as a baby after the violent death of her parents, who were presumed rebels.
Mother is exacting but mercurial, strict about cleanliness yet apt to forget or overlook things during one of her “spells.” Lena pushes the boundaries of her independence, believing that Mother only wants to protect her but still longing to explore the degraded wilderness beyond the compound.
Mother was right, because Mother was always right about these kinds of things. The world was a complicated place, and Mother understood it much better than she did.
In the house, there was no privacy. In the house, Mother saw all.
Mother was Lena’s world. And Lena, in turn, was hers. No matter how angry they got at each other, no matter how much they fought, no matter the things that Mother did or didn’t do … they had each other.
It takes a while to work out just how tech-reliant this scenario is, what the repeated references to “the pit bull” are about, and how Lena emulated and resented Isabella, the Morel daughter, in equal measure. Even creepier than the satellites’ plan to digitize humans is the fact that Isabella’s security drone, Anton, can fabricate recorded memories. This reminded me a lot of Klara and the Sun. Tech themes aren’t my favourite, but I ultimately thought of this as an allegory of life with a narcissistic mother and the child’s essential task of breaking free. It’s not clinical and contrived, though; it’s a taut, subtle thriller with an evocative setting. (Public library)
See also: “Three on a Theme: Matrescence Memoirs”
Does one or more of these books take your fancy?
Buddy Reads: Kilmeny of the Orchard by L.M. Montgomery & The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
Buddy reading and other coordinated challenges are a good excuse to read the sort of books one doesn’t always get to, especially the more obscure classics. This was my third Lucy Maud Montgomery novel within a year and a bit, and my first contribution to Ali’s ongoing year with Margaret Drabble.
{SPOILERS IN BOTH OF THE FOLLOWING REVIEWS}
Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery (1910)
I’ve participated in Canadian bloggers Naomi of Consumed by Ink and Sarah Emsley’s readalongs of three Montgomery works now. The previous two were Jane of Lantern Hill and The Story Girl. This sweet but rather outdated novella reminded me more of the latter (no surprise as it was published just a year before it) because of the overall sense of lightness and the male perspective, which isn’t what those familiar with the Anne and Emily books might expect from Montgomery.
Eric Marshall travels to Prince Edward Island one May to be the temporary schoolmaster in Lindsay, filling in for an ill friend. At his graduation from Queenslea College, his cousin David Baker had teased him about his apparent disinterest in girls. He arrives on the island to an early summer idyll and soon wanders into an orchard where a beautiful young woman is playing a violin.
This is, of course, Kilmeny Gordon, her first name from a Scottish ballad by James Hogg, and it’s clear she will be the love interest. However, there are a couple of impediments to the romance. One is resistance from Kilmeny’s guardians, the strict aunt and uncle who have cared for her since her wronged mother’s death. But the greater obstacle is Kilmeny’s background – illegitimacy plus a disability that everyone bar Eric views as insuperable: she is mute (or, as the book has it, “dumb”). She hears and understands perfectly well, but communicates via writing on a slate.
There is interesting speculation as to whether her condition is psychological or magically inherited from her late mother, who had taken a vow of silence. Conveniently, cousin David is a doctor specializing in throat and voice problems, so assures Eric and the Gordons that nothing is physically preventing Kilmeny from speech. But she refuses to marry Eric until she can speak. The scene in which she fears for his life and calls out to save him is laughably contrived. The language around disability is outmoded. It’s also uncomfortable that the story’s villain, an adopted Gordon cousin, is characterized only by his Italian heritage.
Like The Story Girl, I found this fairly twee, with an unfortunate focus on beauty (“‘Kilmeny’s mouth is like a love-song made incarnate in sweet flesh,’ said Eric enthusiastically”), and marriage as the goal of life. But it was still a pleasant read, especially for the descriptions of a Canadian spring. (Downloaded from Project Gutenberg) #ReadingKilmeny
The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble (1969)
This was Drabble’s fourth novel; I’ve read the previous three and preferred two of them to this (A Summer Bird-Cage is fab). The setup is similar to The Garrick Year, which I read last year for book club, in that the focus is on a young mother of two who embarks on an affair. When we meet Jane Gray she is awaiting the birth of her second child. Her husband, Malcolm, walked out a few weeks ago, but she has the midwife and her cousin Lucy to rely on. Lucy and her husband, James, trade off staying over with Jane as she recovers from childbirth. James is particularly solicitous and, one night, joins Jane in bed.
At this point there is a stark shift from third person to first person as Jane confesses that she’s been glossing over the complexities of the situation; sleeping with one’s cousin’s husband is never going to be without emotional fallout. “It won’t, of course, do: as an account, I mean, of what took place”; “Lies, lies, it’s all lies. A pack of lies.” The novel continues to alternate between first and third person as Jane gives us glimpses into her uneasy family-making. I found myself bored through much of it, only perking back up for the meta stuff and the one climactic event. In a way it’s a classic tale of free will versus fate, including the choice of how to frame what happens.
I am no longer capable of inaction – then I will invent a morality that condones me.
It wasn’t so, it wasn’t so. I am getting tired of all this Freudian family nexus, I want to get back to that schizoid third-person dialogue.
The narrative tale. The narrative explanation. That was it, or some of it. I loved James because he was what I had never had: because he drove too fast: because he belonged to my cousin: because he was kind to his own child
(What intriguing punctuation there!) The fast driving and obsession with cars is unsubtle foreshadowing: James nearly dies in a car accident on the way to the ferry to Norway. Jane and her children, Laurie and baby Bianca, are in the car but unhurt. This was the days when seatbelts weren’t required, apparently. “It would have been so much simpler if he had been dead: so natural a conclusion, so poetic in its justice.” The Garrick Year, too, has a near-tragedy involving a car. Like many an adultery story, both novels ask whether an affair changes everything, or nothing. Infidelity and the parenting of young children together don’t amount to the most scintillating material, but it is appealing to see Drabble experimenting with how to tell a story. See also Ali’s review. (Secondhand – Alnwick charity shopping)
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.
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?
20 Books of Summer, 15–17: Bill Buford, Kristin Newman, J. Courtney Sullivan
One last foodie selection for the summer: a chef’s memoir set mostly in Lyon, France. Plus a bawdy travel memoir I DNFed halfway through, and an engaging but probably overlong contemporary novel about finances, generational conflict and women’s relationships.
Dirt: Adventures in French Cooking by Bill Buford (2020)
Buford’s Heat was one of the highlights of my foodie summer reading in 2020. This is a sequel insomuch as it tells you what he did next, after his Italian-themed apprenticeships. The short answer is that he went to Lyon to learn French cooking in similarly obsessive fashion. Without knowing a word of French. And this time he had a wife and twin toddlers in tow. He met several celebrated French chefs – Michel Richard, Paul Bocuse, Daniel Boulud – and talked his way into training at a famous cookery school and in Michelin-starred kitchens.
These experiences are discussed in separate essays, so I rather lost track of the timeline. It’s odd that it took the author so many years to get around to publishing about it all. You’d think his sons were still young, but in fact they’re now approaching adulthood. The other slightly unusual thing is the amount of space Buford devotes to his pet theory that French cuisine (up to ragout, at least) evolved from Italian. Unsurprisingly, the French don’t favour this idea; I didn’t particularly care one way or the other.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading about his encounters with French bureaucracy; the stress of working in busy (and macho) restaurants, where he’s eventually entrusted with cooking the staff lunch; and his discovery of what makes for good bread: small wheat-growing operations rather than industrially produced flour – his ideal was the 90-cent baguette from his local boulangerie. This could have been a bit more focused, and I’m still more likely to recommend Heat, but I am intrigued to go to Lyon one day. (Secondhand gift, Christmas 2022)
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman (2014)
(DNF, 156/291 pages) As featured in my Six Degrees post earlier in the month. Newman is a comedy writer for film and television (That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, etc.). I liked how the title unabashedly centres things other than couplehood and procreation. When she’s travelling, she can be spontaneous, open-to-experience “Kristin-adjacent,” who loves doing whatever it is that locals do. And be a party girl, of course (“If there is one thing that is my favorite thing in the world, it’s making out on a dance floor”). However, this chronological record of her sexual conquests in Amsterdam, Paris, Russia, Argentina, etc. gets repetitive and raunchy. I also felt let down when I learned that she married and had a child right after she published it. So this was just her “Pietra Pan” stage before she copied everyone else. Which is fine, but were her drunken shenanigans really worth commemorating? (Secondhand, Bas Books & Home)
Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan (2020)
I got Emma Straub vibes from this big, juicy novel focusing on two women in upstate New York: Elisabeth, a married journalist who moved out of Brooklyn when she finally conceived via IVF; and Sam, a college art student who becomes her son Gil’s babysitter. Elisabeth misses her old crowd and doesn’t fit in with the middle-aged book club ladies in her suburban neighbourhood; Sam is almost her only friend, a confidante who’s also like a little sister (better, anyway, than Elisabeth’s real sister, who lives on tropical islands and models swimwear for inspirational Instagram posts). And Sam admires Elisabeth for simultaneously managing a career and motherhood with seeming aplomb.
But fundamental differences between the two emerge, mostly to do with economics. Elisabeth comes from money and takes luxury products for granted, while Sam is solidly working-class and develops a surprising affinity with Elisabeth’s father-in-law, George, who is near bankruptcy after Uber killed off his car service business. His pet theory, “The Hollow Tree,” explains that ordinary Americans have been sold the lie that they are responsible for their own success, when really they are in thrall to corporations and the government doesn’t support them as it should. This message hits home for Sam, who is distressed about the precarious situation of the Latina dining hall employees she has met via her work study job. Both Elisabeth and Sam try to turn their privilege to the good, with varied results.
Although I remained engrossed in the main characters’ stories, which unfold in alternating chapters, I thought this could easily have been 300 pages instead of nearly 400. In particular, Sullivan belabours Sam’s uncertainty over her thirtysomething English fiancé, Clive, whom Elisabeth refers to as “sleazy-hot.” The red flags are more than obvious to others in Sam’s life, and to us as readers, yet we get scene after scene meant to cast shade on him. I also kept wondering if first person would have been the better delivery mode for one or both strands. Still, this was perfect literary cross-over summer reading. (Little Free Library)