Three Novels with (Tenuous) May Connections
Last year I read a May Sarton novel for the anniversary of her death; this year I thought I’d pick one up for her birth month. When I spotted mentions of May in the first line of two more novels from my shelves, I decided to make it a trio, however tenuous.
Hood by Emma Donoghue (1995)
First line: “Mayday in 1980, heat sealing my fingers together.”
Pen opens her story with a flashback of wandering Dublin with her girlfriend, Cara, when they were teenagers. “Why is it the most ordinary images that fall out, when I shuffle the memories? Two girls in a secondhand bookshop, hands sticky with sampled perfumes”. But in the novel’s present day, 13 years later, news has just come that Cara died in a crash on her way home by taxi after a Greek island holiday. They were only out to their lesbian friends; even Cara’s father, whose home they lived in together, was in the dark about their relationship, so Pen is in a curious position as the secret ‘widow’. “I felt such an amateur,” she confides. “About to embark on the biggest loss I could imagine, with no practice at mourning a mother or even a pop star”.
Pen requests compassionate leave for the death of her ‘housemate’ from the Catholic school where she teaches. She and Mr Wall have plenty of sadmin to do while also hosting his other daughter, Kate, who’s come back from America for the funeral. Pen keeps a lid on her emotions, seeing to household routines and attending formal and informal memorial services, but all the while she’s visited by memories from her life with Cara. (Not all happy; she wasn’t thrilled with Cara’s bisexuality and nonmonogamy.) Many are sensual: Pen is a woman with a strong appetite for food and sex, and matter-of-factly calls herself fat. The title is a riff on sisterhood but also connects to a reference to – ahem – the clitoral hood. Pen’s reliving of her lovemaking with Cara is often a little too anatomical in that way to be hot.
Last year I read Donoghue’s debut novel, Stir-fry; this was her second. Cara is more than a little reminiscent of Jael from the earlier book. I worried we would get an excruciating scene in which Pen attempts to act on her childhood crush on Kate, but luckily that’s not the case. The book is structured in seven long chapters, one per day for a week. It seemed far-fetched to me that Pen would already be clearing the house of Cara’s belongings within days of her death. While I appreciated the different angle on grief, Pen’s positive body image, and the way that liturgical and theological language permeates her thinking even though she no longer feels associated with the Catholic Church (“Grant me spiritual enlightenment through pain, sure, Lord, grand, you’re on, but not tonight”), this didn’t charm me like Stir-fry did. It felt a little too niche, like you’d need to be familiar with the 1990s lesbian scene to really feel welcome. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski (2024)
First line: “On the last Saturday in May, I drown in my sleep.”
This debut novel about a high school girl’s accidental death at a party is structured in two halves: five chapters headed “Pre” and another five under “Post.” Each one is narrated by a different girl or woman from a Boston-area community. They are dealing with chronic illness, loss, relationship difficulties, or career confusion. The prose is often lyrical, but the portraits don’t seem to add up to much and the character names are confusingly similar (Mona – Marina – Maureen; Layla – Lila – Lucy). I wondered if I would have preferred Grabowski’s writing in a short story collection. (Passed on by Susan, who reviewed it here – thank you!)
The Bridge of Years by May Sarton (1946)
This is miniature saga of a Belgian family in the interwar years. Mélanie Duchesne is a furniture dealer and her husband, Paul, a philosopher who’s trying but failing to write a book. Their country home seems like an idyll, but even in this small community there are those whose lives have been irreparably damaged by wartime trauma. There are passages that feel just like a still life:
The room was full of sunlight warming the orange walls, making pools of ruddy light on the copper pots and the shining blue-and-white plates that stood on a shelf at the back, but not dissipating the melancholy face, in the portrait on the wall, of a thin, thoughtful little boy wrapped up in a blue scarf, who was Paul twenty years ago.
I made it through most of Part I, “Spring,” but put this back on the shelf to try another time when I have the patience for lovely prose and less attention to plot. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Spring Reading, Part II: Helen Bain, Stephen King & Ivan Turgenev
When I posted for the first day of spring, I noted that it was already like early summer in the UK. Today it feels like summer is here to stay. After an April with just 18% of normal rainfall, our pond is looking half-empty. It was a surprisingly chilly mid-May, but really hot weather (low 30s C / high 80s F) is moving in just in time for the bank holiday weekend. Myriad insects find a haven in our lush, unmowed garden full of trees, wildflowers and so-called weeds. Benny is closely supervised on his three or four daily walks in this garden jungle. I love to see swifts wheeling through the sky, but I’d happily sacrifice the sun to get some more rain.
My three selections for this batch of seasonal reading are an excellent forthcoming novel about Sylvia Plath, a historical novella that’s become well known through the movie version, and obscure Russian classics about infatuations that end in heartbreak.
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain
(A quick preview as my full review will be published on Shelf Awareness next month.) A bit of background: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath moved from London to Court Green, a thatched house with two and a half acres of land in North Tawton, Devon (southwest England) in August 1961. They had separated and each moved into lodgings in London – her with their two children – by December 1962, with Plath vowing to return to her beloved house and garden in the spring. Instead, she died by suicide in February 1963. This debut novel covers much of the last 18 months of Plath’s life, but in an inventive way: 16 linked short stories – each from the perspective of a different writer friend, family member, or local acquaintance – illuminate Plath’s personality and state of mind through the interactions they have with her. It’s everyone from her midwife to a washing machine salesman. We learn not just about Plath but also the norms of the time, e.g. through young women she meets at a dress shop and in a BBC recording studio. There are also glimpses into her literary milieu through a visit from Al Alvarez and reminiscences from the Kanes and Merwins. The title refers to her garden’s daffodils, so bountiful that she sells them, which strikes her neighbours as a typically American act of crass gumption. The really genius thing about this structure is that the vignettes go backward in time, so we aren’t approaching her inevitable end but anticipating her prime. Bain’s prose reminds me of Tessa Hadley and Andrew Miller. (Edelweiss) 
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King (1982)
This novella was published in Different Seasons under the heading “Hope Springs Eternal.” You probably know the story better through the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.
“They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring’s crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.”
Andy Dufresne was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover in 1947. While he bides his time until the workings of justice or his own spectacular efforts can get him free, he makes himself useful as the prison librarian and an unofficial financial advisor (he was a banker back in the real world). He fights back against attempted sexual assaults, too. The narrator, Red, can get anyone anything on the black market, and Andy has made two very specific requests over the years: a rock hammer to continue his geology hobby, and a poster of Rita Hayworth to hang in his cell – replaced in turn, as years stretch into nearly three decades, by Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch, and Linda Ronstadt. All along, the hope of there being a life away from this place keeps Andy, and Red, going. Even though I knew what happened thanks to the movie, this was a quick, amusing, and heartening read. I’ll probably go on to read the other three in the omnibus. (Little Free Library) 
The Torrents of Spring (& First Love & “Mumu”) by Ivan Turgenev (1871; 1860; 1854)
[Translated from Russian by Constance Garnett]
I’ve found Turgenev to be a particularly readable Russian master whose novels are short and accessible enough as to not be daunting (unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the like, who I’ve never attempted). I had a bit of confusion over this on, not realising my download included the novella First Love and the short story “Mumu” as well, so The Torrents of Spring ended sooner than I expected. It’s said to be highly autobiographical, but I haven’t looked into the links with Turgenev’s life. Twenty-two-year-old landowner Dimitri Sanin is in Frankfurt as part of a world tour. By chance, he rescues young Emil from a swoon and meets his family of Italian confectioners. Captivated by Emil’s sister Gemma’s simple beauty, he fights a duel to defend her honour and gets her to give up her tedious German fiancé for him. His plan is to stay and remotely sell his estate (complete with serfs) to a fellow Russian abroad – the wife of Polozov, a man he happens to know from childhood. But, as in Dangerous Liaisons, Maria Nikolaevna is a seductive schemer who steals his gaze away from Gemma just because she can. This was a gently Hardyesque tragicomedy about what’s fated versus the decisions and weaknesses that change everything. Turgenev explores what happens when money, love and lust don’t align, and leaves us with the aura of inevitable regret. 
The other two stories share that theme of capricious women. In First Love, sixteen-year-old Vladimir Petrovich is one of many suitors vying for the affections of his next-door neighbour, the young princess Zinaïda. He’s so smitten that when she says jump, he basically asks how high (and it ends up being 15 feet down from a wall). There’s an unexpected twist in this one that makes you question the young man’s family dynamic. The message can be summed up by the advice he’s given by another suitor: “The great thing is to lead a normal life, and not be the slave of your passions.” I was interested to note in both novellas that French is spoken as a marker of the upper classes.
“Mumu” started off promising, but I should know by now that when an animal is a central character in a classic work, it’s not going to go well. Mumu is a spaniel rescued by Gerasim, a giant deaf-mute man who labours on an old woman’s estate. His mistress observes that he’s sweet on Tatiana the laundress and quashes that budding relationship, at which point Mumu enters his life as a sort of replacement. Mumu is utterly devoted to him and suspicious of anyone else – including the mistress, who soon makes it her mission to silence the barking dog. It’s all disappointingly conventional and I wished it could have been otherwise, but I guess Turgenev, like so many other 19th-century authors – Dickens, Flaubert – felt duty-bound to keep women and peasants in their place. 
(Project Gutenberg)
Three on a Theme: Bog Body Novels by Balen, Holmes & North
I’ve been down something of a rabbit hole this year, reading four novels centred on the discovery of a bog body. I heard about Anna North’s first and, as a big fan of The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (and, to a lesser extent, Outlawed), had to read it. Who could resist the setup of scientists trying to solve a millennia-old murder mystery? When I learned that the theme of Katya Balen’s adult fiction debut was similar, there was no choice but to make it a trio. Through the library I located a teen novel that links the discovery of a bog body at the Irish border with a young man’s experience of The Troubles, Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd. I ended up reviewing that for Reading Ireland Month instead, but then spotted a backlist mystery – again, about a bog body discovery in Ireland – and couldn’t resist.
There are some common elements in all four of these novels. The authors briefly mention the special qualities of peat bog that preserve a corpse. In each case, the body is unearthed by accident and found to be that of a victim of violence – a kind of symbolic, corporate punishment. A female archaeologist is the lead researcher caught up in studying the body. In the Holmes and North, the archaeologist is the main character and has to deal with protesters; the other two feature a lay protagonist. The discovery becomes a matter of personal significance for all of them, though. (Discussed in the order in which I read them. The three below are also linked by an Anna!)
Bog Queen by Anna North (2025)
Dr. Agnes Linstrom is an American forensic scientist in Manchester for a postdoctoral fellowship. When a woman’s body is found in a patch of peat bog in Ludlow, she’s called down to give her expert opinion. Police think they’ve finally solved a 1960s spousal murder, but it soon becomes clear that the corpse is much, much older. Alternating chapters follow Agnes’s 2018 investigation, complicated by competing claims on the bog (a peat company vs. environmental protesters, who have occupied the site); and the story of the Iron Age druid who came to be buried in the bog.
As per usual with a dual-narrative novel, I was more engaged with the contemporary storyline, so rather felt I had to push myself through the historical material so I could get back to the good stuff. Luckily, though, North doesn’t spoil the Celtic Britain segments with too much research or attempts at archaic speech. Occasional short sections from the point-of-view of a colony of moss were unnecessary but harmless. Subtle parallels emerge between Agnes and the druid, both young women who have to fight to be taken seriously, hope to live up to family expectations, and struggle to see the way forward.
Agnes works with other female scientists who seem to represent different ways of living: Sunita, who’s married to a woman and has a teenage daughter, Ruby; and Danielle, who’s easing back into work after a difficult childbirth. I thought the connections to Agnes’s past and potential future were a little heavy-handed in the party scene where she commiserates with Ruby over mental health and holds Danielle’s baby. If I were being unkind, I might also say that the characters are designed to tick boxes (Sunita = South Asian and queer; Nicholas, the lead protester = Black). Overall, though, this is illuminating about women’s lives then and now – not as different as one might hope – and kept me turning the pages to find out what happened to the not one, but two, bodies the bog disgorges. (Public library)
{SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO}
Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen (2026)
This was Balen’s adult debut after many works for children. Anna is stuck on her contracted novel when she gets a place on a retreat for writers who are struggling financially. Her struggle is more against despair, though: her mother is disappearing into dementia, and she recently had a stillborn daughter. The latter fact is not fully revealed until maybe halfway through, despite some heavy foreshadowing, so until then we are left to wonder why Anna left her husband, JP, who seems like a great guy (a considerate French chef, what’s not to like?), and why she is so inept and bent on sabotaging her own life.
When a bog body is found near the cottage where she’s staying, Anna becomes imaginatively and emotionally involved in the ensuing exhumation. As in Bog Child and Bog Queen, the corpse is that of a woman and it becomes clear that she was executed – punishment for a perceived social infraction, but also emblematic of the systemic misogyny of the time. Anna becomes enmeshed with the archaeologists, especially Jen, who wears a custom ring as a tribute to each woman she has found dead.
While the content of this novel ticked a lot of interest boxes for me, I didn’t particularly enjoy the style. The attempt to wring poetry out of a mental health crisis too often results in pretentious fragments – as in this sample two-page spread. (Read via Edelweiss / Public library)
The Find by Anna M Holmes (2022)
Construction on a retail park in Ireland stops abruptly when a digger encounters a body in the peat, and before long it’s clear that this is not a Troubles victim. Dr Carrie O’Neill, a young archaeologist from New Zealand, becomes “the Face of the Find” as media outlets become increasingly obsessed with the mystery of Ballybere Man. The furore only heightens when certain research conclusions are released about him: he was from Palestine, lived about two thousand years ago, had his body lovingly embalmed with pine needle stuffing and a coating of honey, and has wounds in his feet and hands consistent with crucifixion.
It’s such an interesting setup, pitting the scientists, who are determined to uncover the whole truth, against the religious powers that be – everyone from the Roman Catholic hierarchy to American fundamentalists – to whom the very idea of Jesus’s physical body being extant is an affront. Holmes makes Carrie a sympathetic character what with her homesickness, grief for her grandmother, relationship with Irish Times journalist Finn Durante, and harassment by extremists. But I was disappointed that a pretty standard thriller plot of abduction, blackmail, and violence ensues. From the cover you can tell that the author and publisher were hoping to attract readers of Peter May. The bog body itself is just a stand-in for an ideological impasse and so ends up feeling less important than in any of the other novels. (Read via BookSirens)
Another readalike: Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson, a charming, bittersweet epistolary novel in which an English farmer’s wife writes to the curator at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark about the Tollund Man.
“Peat might just save the world.”
~Victoria Gatehouse
Last year a book I helped crowdfund, The Book of Bogs, edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw, was released by independent publisher Little Toller Books. The project began as a protest against a proposed wind farm that would obliterate Walshaw Moor in Yorkshire, which inspired the Brontë sisters and Ted Hughes. It’s astonishingly comprehensive and I’m only a third of the way through so far. I’ve been reading slowly, one or two pieces a week. There is art and poetry (I’ve been enjoying this the most so far) as well as environmentally minded essays. I’m looking forward to work by some greats of the nature writing world.
Earlier this year, I got to attend a special preview evening (put on for local charities – this was in my capacity as a Repair Café volunteer) of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award exhibition at The Base in Greenham. I was already working on this trio so was alert for photographs of bogs and moss.
Three on a Theme: Works of (Auto)biography by Susie Boyt, Sarah Laing and Jenn Shapland
“If biography is peering through the windows of someone’s house and describing what you see … [then] memoir is peeking into the windows of your own life. A voyeurism of the self. An interior looting.”
~Jenn Shapland
This thematic trio has been in the works for an awfully long time: I read the Laing in 2022 and also started the Shapland that year but took an inexplicable pause and didn’t finish it until a couple of days ago. All three are about understanding the self by way of an obsession with a particular woman from history. Sometimes it’s also a matter of coming to terms with one’s sexuality. In each case, the premise is biographical but the pursuit and reflections end up being equally autobiographical. These are beautifully introspective works with such an appealing approach that they made me ponder who I would pinpoint as my (auto)biographical muse. All: 
My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt (2008)
After discovering Boyt through her brilliant latest novel, Loved and Missed, I was keen to try more from her. This Ackerley Prize-shortlisted memoir was just as fascinating as it sounded. Seeing The Wizard of Oz turned Boyt into a Garland mega-fan.
A daughter of Lucian Freud raised by a single mother, Boyt was a sensitive, earnest and lonely child who harboured hopeless dreams of being on the stage herself. She admires Garland’s talent, pluck, hard work and grit. After all, Garland remained the ‘world’s greatest entertainer’ despite struggling with mental illness and prescription drug dependency for three decades.
When I begin to listen to Judy Garland there is no joy or wound from the story of my life that isn’t with me. … Her central credo, and it always always comes to me as her voice begins to swell, is that to be the person with the strongest feelings in life is to be the best. This is an instinct I am quite sure I was born with.
Boyt meets fellow Garland mega-fans in person and online, and visits her hero’s Birthplace Home and Museum (in Grand Rapids, Minnesota) and mausoleum (then in Hartsdale, New York). She draws distinctions between “bad fans” with a morbid eye to Garland’s struggles (they memorise her suicide notes, for instance), “good fans” like herself who acknowledge she was no saint but choose to focus on her successes, and the “crazy-good fans” who won’t hear a word said against her. It’s reassuring that Boyt recognises ambiguity.
“I don’t claim to know Judy Garland, of this I am sure. I feel very close to her, I love her, but I don’t understand. Perhaps I never will. I accept there are layers and layers of things.”
I don’t retain a lot of the detail of this book after over a year (and no notes, silly me!), but I do remember that I felt it blends biography and memoir skilfully and incorporates illuminating discussions of addiction, mental health, celebrity, fandom and the search for love – Garland married five times. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Mansfield and Me: A Graphic Memoir by Sarah Laing (2016)
(I’ve added a few lines to my original review from 2022.) Growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand an aspiring writer, Laing looked to Katherine Mansfield as one of her idols. Here she alternates between vignettes from her own past in vivid colour and scenes from Mansfield’s short life in black and white. The Mansfield material is drawn from her letters and notebooks as well as various biographies. Mansfield was friendly with the Bloomsbury Group and lost a brother in the First World War. Laing uses a few Mansfield story titles as chapter headings, has Mansfield’s ghost turn up to comment on her authorial choices, and compares and contrasts their careers and love lives. Laing published her first short story collection at 34 – the age at which Mansfield died of tuberculosis. They share a bisexual identity. Mansfield married twice and miscarried her only pregnancy by a lover; by the end of this book Laing is married and a mother of three. This made me want to read more of Mansfield’s stories; I’ve only read a few thus far. “Katherine’s stories were full of … little lamps – moments of illumination, flashes of truth. I don’t need to be famous, but I would like someone to really see me,” Laing concludes. I’ve also reviewed her Let Me Be Frank. (New purchase – Waterstones sale)
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland (2020)
When Shapland was an intern at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, Austin (a famous literary archive), someone requested the letters sent by Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach to the writer Carson McCullers. To Shapland’s surprise, these were basically love letters. “I had received letters like these,” she writes. “I had written letters like these to the women I’d loved. It was very little to go on, and yet I felt an utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women.” The discovery sparked a quest to know all there was to know about McCullers (she archived the writer’s clothing as part of the internship, too). It also, somehow, liberated Shapland to fully accept her lesbian identity. She was, by this point, in her mid-twenties and had been dating a fellow female student for six years, yet had been semi-closeted the whole time. The letters were, she acknowledges, “a turning point.”
Shapland later spent a month in McCullers’s childhood home in Columbus, Georgia* and worked through her archive at the state university there. Annemarie was by no means the only same-sex entanglement; Shapland lists another 21 possible girlfriends, with McCullers’s correspondence with her therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer, being particularly suggestive. But Shapland had hardly found some lesbian role model: McCullers married the same man, Reeves McCullers, twice, and called her special women “imaginary friends.” (Not to mention that she was an alcoholic, and struggled with chronic illness until her death at age 50.)
Dogged in her own search for evidence, Shapland nonetheless decries unjust expectations: “Historians demand proof from queer love stories that they never require of straight relationships.” How to prove happiness? she wonders. “Love … lives in the mundane, the moment-to-moment exchanges, and can so easily become invisible after the people who shared it are no longer alive. But, of course, it leaves traces.” I thought Shapland was perhaps too insistent on the word “lesbian” – only once entertaining the possibility that McCullers was bisexual, and never seriously considering fluidity or a change of sexuality. “I prefer the idea that we are all part lesbian, that we are lesbian to one degree or another,” she insists. “Is this semantics?” True to her dual vocation as author and archivist, Shapland continually interrogates how language and objects don’t just reflect reality, but create it. I was impressed by her willingness to call herself out on how she might be “shellacking, setting [McCullers] on my terms despite my desire to give her space in her own words.”
This debut work, a Lambda Literary Award winner and finalist for the National Book Award, is in titled sections that range in length from one paragraph to several pages. Shapland drifts back and forth in time and between her own life and McCullers’s, following thought and memory in loose loops but still conveying the sense of a chronological investigation. She doesn’t devote a lot of space to McCullers’s oeuvre– this is definitely not a work of literary appreciation or criticism – but I’m intrigued enough by the writer’s life and even a bare outline of the recurring themes and elements in her fiction to try her soon. Meanwhile, I have Shapland’s second book, the essay collection Thin Skin, on my e-reader. Her final plea for queer visibility here may be more for her own sake than for the historical McCullers, but either way it persuaded me. “Call it love.”
*I’ve not read McCullers but have always meant to, not least because my father is from Columbus, Georgia. His wasn’t a bookish family and I was never aware of the McCullers connection, though when I mentioned this book to my dad a few years ago he did know her name.
With thanks to Virago for the free copy for review.
Three for #ReadingWales26: Tishani Doshi, Gwyneth Lewis & Jan Morris
As well as Reading Ireland Month, it’s Reading Wales Month, hosted by Karen of BookerTalk and Kath of Nut Press. I read three relevant books by women – my ideal trio of a novel, a poetry collection and a memoir – and also experienced some additional poetry via a special church service.
Fountainville by Tishani Doshi (2013)
This is part of a Seren series retelling the medieval Welsh legends in the Mabinogion. Doshi has Welsh and Indian parentage; here she blends her knowledge of both countries and their stories. Luna, the narrator, works as an assistant to Begum, the Lady of the Fountain. Begum and her husband Kedar, a gangster, operate a shady surrogacy clinic. Then Owain Knight comes to town and makes Luna a proposition and things get complicated. Though this is novella length, it took me ages to slog through it. My lack of familiarity with the source text felt like a problem – I’d rather it had been summarized in a foreword rather than an afterword – and Doshi’s narrative is insipid despite the soap opera-ready content; I saw none of the spark and originality I’ve found in her excellent poetry. On this evidence I’m unlikely to pick up any more of her fiction. In any case, it was appropriate that I bought an ex-Swansea Libraries copy from Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. (Secondhand purchase)
First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis (2025)
I’ve read a couple of Lewis’s poetry collections before (e.g. Parables and Faxes), as well as her memoir of depression and her travel book about sailing with her husband. She was Wales’s first poet laureate in 2005–6 and this is her sixth collection in English. The first section about her childhood with an emotionally abusive mother envisions her mother as a spider. The rest of the book traces the effects of that early trauma into chronic illness and mental health struggles. There is a sense of lost time. “Late Blackberries” opens “Where was I during the glut? I missed / the first sweetness, alluring and glossy // black as a dormouse’s eye, when pickings / were easy. A decade lost being ill tastes // bitter.” The imagery is drawn from physics, the countryside, medieval religious art, and the discovery of mummies. The two most quintessentially Welsh poems are “Red Waistcoat,” about coming across a dead ewe in a field, and “Under,” commemorating a fatal 2011 mining accident. Forasmuch as the book’s themes seemed perfectly assembled to appeal to me, I never felt they’d been brought to life in the language. (Secondhand purchase – Exeter charity shop)
A Writer’s House in Wales by Jan Morris (2002)
“My house is so absolutely of its setting, is rooted so profoundly not just in the soil, but in the very idea of Wales, that anywhere else it would lose all charisma.”
Although Jan Morris was famous for travelling the world and writing all about it, she equally loved being able to retreat to Trefan Morys, “for me … a summation, a metaphor, a paradigm, a microcosm, an examplar, a multum in parvo, a demonstration, a solidification, an essence, a regular epitome of all that I love about my country.” That excerpt from the first paragraph is a typical example of her effusive overwriting. This short book was clearly written for people (Americans) who know nothing about Wales, not even where on earth it is. I love her cosy evocation of her home – actually the renovated 18th-century stable block of the former family home, ample for her and Elizabeth in their dotage – and its bookshelves and animal life, whether domestic (Ibsen the Norwegian forest cat) or wild (bats in the attic!).
However, this was a reread and I found it indulgent as well as quaint this time around. It reminded me most of her diaries (the first volume was In My Mind’s Eye) and would be ideal for reading in tandem with those. Morris writes, “I am emotionally in thrall to Welshness.” I couldn’t help but think of biographer Sara Wheeler’s words about Morris’s contradictions: “she was a famous chronicler of the British Empire (some say an apologist for it) and a card-carrying Welsh nationalist. She was singular and contrary”. Wheeler slept in this house, in Morris’s bed, after her death while working through the papers.
I’ve always meant to source more from this National Geographic Directions series of brief travel books in which authors celebrate a beloved place. The only other I’ve read is Land’s End, Michael Cunningham’s book on Provincetown. (Free from The Book Thing of Baltimore)
For Advent last year and Lent this year, my church put on special evening compline services that combine liturgy and folk-inspired music my husband helped with. Earlier this month we had an extraordinary R.S. Thomas-themed service with some poems read aloud from the pulpit and others set to avant-garde music (a theremin was ruled out, but a harmonium, melodeon and glockenspiel featured, as well as a mandolin, banjo, toy piano and electric guitar). I was mostly unfamiliar with Thomas, who was a priest as well as a poet, and was gobsmacked by the commingling of scientific and theological vocabulary and the tolerance of doubt. Here are some extracts.
It is this great absence
that is like a presence,
that compels me to address it without hope
of a reply.
You speak
all languages and none,
answering our most complex
prayers with the simplicity
of a flower, confronting
us, when we would domesticate you
to our uses, with the rioting
viruses under our lens.
You have made God small,
setting him astride
a pipette
And all this in a carefully assembled pamphlet that I’ve kept as a souvenir.
I might not have chosen the best books this year, but I’m still feeling well disposed towards the Welsh. A nice link is that Thomas lived just a few miles from Morris. In her book she calls him “perhaps the greatest Welsh poet writing in English since George Herbert.” She describes him thus: “I last set eyes on R. S. Thomas standing all alone beside our coastal road gazing silently into an adjacent wood, as though communing with the crows and blackbirds in its branches … Whenever I recall him at the roadside that day, looking silently into the trees as though the answer to all things was to be found among them, the memory gives me a sense of calm and liberation, as Wales itself does”.
Three for the First Day of Spring: Renkl, Sukegawa and Tucker
I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer.
~I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Happy spring! (Although the blossom is fading and, going by the temperature the past few days, you might think it was early summer here.) When I borrowed the psychological thriller The First Day of Spring from the library, I decided to consider that my built-in review deadline. As is my wont, I’ve turned it into a trio with two books more laterally related to spring: a lovely book of miniature autobiographical essays about interactions with family and the natural world, and a short Japanese novel about misfits who find belonging at a pancake restaurant.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl (2019)
My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.
The memoir in flash essays is one of my favourite niche forms. (Beth-Ann Fennelly and Abigail Thomas also do it exceptionally well.) It took me a long time to promote this book from occasional bedside reading pile to daytime stack, but at a certain point it became impossible to let it out of my hands for very long. I had to smell it and browse her brother Billy’s collage artworks. Each piece is somewhere between a paragraph and several pages long, and they make up a rough chronology of a life, from her grandmother’s memories of the 1930s onward (the passages in italics are interview transcripts) through to the present day.
Renkl grew up in Alabama in the 1960s–70s, in the sort of mildly dysfunctional family that most of us probably have. She contrasts what she knew as a child with what she didn’t. It was a happy childhood but. (Her mother’s recurring mental health problems and racial tensions in the South would be two ways to finish that sentence.) There were hounds and porch seats and three kids in the backseat on vacations. There were funerals and old love songs and Bible verses and playing in the woods. Grandmother tells of births and deaths, and Renkl remembers life’s transitions: getting her first period, being so homesick that she couldn’t finish college in Philadelphia, adjusting to early motherhood and then to an empty nest – an appropriate metaphor because many of the essays are about birds Renkl watches feeding and nesting. She isn’t naïve; she knows nature is cruel. Not every fledgling will survive and majestic hawks will kill equally beautiful songbirds. She realizes how dire the situation is for monarch butterflies, too, but keeps planting milkweed at her Nashville home.
This balancing of appreciation for life and acceptance of death is at its finest in the late pieces on her parents’ death. Her mother, like mine, died suddenly after a stroke, and her words on that loss are exquisite as well as painful. Still, she asserts, “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”
Like Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Renkl brings a poet’s eye for language and an amateur’s awe at the natural world to her micro-essays. She calls a cedar waxwing “An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation.” This is a book to cherish and learn from and reread. (Birthday gift from my sister from my wish list) 
{SPOILERS IN THESE NEXT TWO REVIEWS}
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (2013; 2017)
[Translated from Japanese by Alison Watts]
It was the colours (especially that wash of cherry-blossom pink) that first attracted me to this book, and the foodie theme that kept me reading. Sentaro manages a small shop on Cherry Blossom Street, Doraharu, which sells dorayaki – pancakes filled with sweet bean paste (“during cherry-blossom season petals sometimes drifted in, falling into the pancakes as they cooked”). He takes little pride in the work; it’s just a way to keep busy and pay off his debts from the time he was in prison for drug-dealing. When an elderly woman named Tokue offers to make the sweet bean paste for a pittance, he decides to give her a trial even though he usually orders it in bulk. Tokue’s homemade is so much better that the shop is soon making record profits. She trains Sentaro up in the art of making the perfect paste, which to her is a mystical process that involves listening to the beans. Not only does Tokue have new ideas for the menu, but she also makes troubled teenage customers such as Wakana welcome with friendly conversation. Along with Marvy the canary, these three form a fragile little family.
But then rumours start spreading about Tokue and her health, and Doraharu’s owner threatens to shut the place down if Sentaro doesn’t let her go. It turns out that she had Hansen’s disease (the preferred term for leprosy) and lives in a sanatorium. Even though she has long since been cured, there is still a stigma, and when she was young she could only find love and community among her fellow patients. In an Author’s Note, Sukegawa explains that the legislation keeping Hansen’s patients isolated was only repealed in 1996. His philosophy, made explicit in the letters Tokue writes to Sentaro after leaving the shop, is that one doesn’t have to be useful to have a meaningful life; simply being alive and observing is enough. I found Tokue saccharine: too wise, good and all-forgiving. This is easy reading, yet the dialogue felt stiff, the characterization thin, the letters unsubtle, and the detail of confectionery-making too technical. Secondhand – public library book sale) 
The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker (2021)
I’d very much admired Tucker’s first two books – The Time in Between, a memoir of her childhood anorexia; and especially That Was When People Started to Worry, case studies of young women’s mental health – so asked my library to purchase her debut novel. Tucker is a trainee clinical psychiatrist. The psychological insight she’s developed professionally and through writing about herself and others served her well in crafting this portrait of a deprived girl who murders other children. I could have included it in my Mother’s Day post because, as in the similarly dark Like Mother (by Jenny Diski), it’s the lack of a mother’s love that leaves the protagonist numb and unsure of how to bring up her own daughter.
It’s no whodunit because eight-year-old Chrissie admits in the novel’s first line, “I killed a little boy today.” The mystery is why, and how she’s ultimately caught. It’s the first day of spring when she commits that first murder, of a toddler who lives on the same rough housing estate. Her house isn’t much of a home with no money for electricity, no food in the cupboards, an emotionally absent mother and a father who comes and goes without warning. Chrissie is always hungry, always craving. She couldn’t stand that Steven was loved and coddled while she had nothing. Harbouring “a delicious secret” gives her a “belly-fizzing feeling … like sherbet exploding in my guts. … That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world.” She wants to tell people what she’s done, but knows she mustn’t.
It’s also the first day of spring when five-year-old Molly falls from a seawall and breaks her wrist. Her mum, Julia, panics when she gets a call from child social services. It becomes clear by the second chapter that Julia is the new name Chrissie was given when she left the residential home for child offenders to start a new life. Sure that they’ll blame her and take Molly away, she gets on a train back to her old neighbourhood to see Mam and her childhood best friend, Linda. “I remembered this in Mam – the pull and push, cling and reject.” The subject matter might have become unbearable had Tucker emphasized the salacious details. Instead, she casts a compassionate eye on generational patterns of neglect and incompetence – patterns that can be broken through hard work. It’s riveting reading, and Julia’s love for Molly and Linda’s enduring friendship brought tears to my eyes. (Public library)
Three on a Theme for Mother’s Day: Baker, Diski and Sampson
It’s Mothering Sunday in the UK today, so, like last year, I’m featuring three very different books about mothers and motherhood: a memoir, a novel and a poetry anthology. There are complex emotions at play in the first two due to grief, abuse and disability. The poems are cheerier (thankfully) and reflect on the experience of motherhood but also of being mothered. On that last point, I’ve added my response to a relevant short story I happened to read today.
Reading My Mother Back: A memoir in childhood animal stories by Timothy C. Baker (2022)
Baker is a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Aberdeen. His first non-academic publication is a curiously beguiling novella-length reappraisal of favourite children’s books. “To misquote Heraclitus, you cannot read the same book twice.” While he’s sheepish about including so many 19th- and early-20th-century white male authors, he can’t do otherwise as these are the texts that first taught him about death, loneliness and friendship: Charlotte’s Web, The Wind in the Willows, The Magician’s Nephew and Watership Down. (Also The Secret Garden.) Baker grew up in Maryland and Vermont, lonesome and closeted, with parents who briefly joined a cult. In his memory, his mother (who had been abused) always suffered with chronic illness and pain. In each chapter, he weaves together a discussion of a plot with stories from his early life and critical opinion on the value of rereading. It helped that I was familiar with six of the nine books Baker features (and others by Gallico, though not The Man Who Was Magic); I’d not even heard of Merle the High Flying Squirrel or The Book of the Dun Cow.
I spotted this in the Wigtown Festival Shop* on our 2023 visit to Scotland’s Book Town and could hardly believe it existed because it seemed so perfectly suited to me: I loved animal books, especially Watership Down, as a child; I’ll read any bereavement memoir going; I grew up 30 miles from Baltimore, where Baker spent his early life; he and I both had strict religious upbringings; and his mother experienced kidney failure (after eating a foxglove??), a link to my family’s history of kidney disease. There are plentiful differences, too, of course, but Baker emphasises connection. “If reading these books has taught me anything,” he concludes, “it is that all of my stories are individual, and all of them are universal. What we share is the unshareability of our grief … [but also] the joy of knowing that we have loved.” And for such a seemingly niche book (from Goldsmiths Press), I have actually found myself mentioning it to two blogger friends in recent days, so that’s proof he was right.
[*As to how the book finally came into my possession: I added it to my wishlist and an acquaintance (a former mayor of Newbury, in fact) bought it for me for my 40th birthday. However, he forgot to bring the gift to our joint party and it took another 2+ years to extract it from him – through explicit reminders when we invited him to join us on a quiz team.]
Like Mother by Jenny Diski (1988)
I’ve enjoyed the late Jenny Diski’s travel memoirs (Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train) and essays (On Trying to Keep Still). This novella was my first taste of her fiction and, while it’s dark as hell, I admired the psychological acuity and playfulness with narration. Occasional chapters introduce a dialogue between Nony and an imaginary interlocutor whose role is to listen to the story of her mother, Frances, a former dancer. That family history is the substance of the rest of the book, which is in an omniscient third person. The artificiality of the setup is blatant, though; Nony can neither think nor speak, having been born without a brain (hydranencephaly). Nony’s full name, Nonentity, is thus Frances’s cruel joke.
By necessity, the story stretches back to Frances’s parents, Ivy and Gerald, whose postwar optimism soon ceded to the reality of addiction, adultery and the attrition of love. A semiferal Frances escaped her unhappy home for the streets of London and engaged in sex play with Stuart on a bombsite. This went on for years. For Stuart, it blossomed into genuine love, but the numb Frances could never return his feelings and only used him. There are some really painful scenes here, such as Stuart stealing ether from the chemistry supply cupboard so she can huff herself into temporary oblivion, and a drunk Ivy molesting adolescent Frances. “Like mother, like daughter” is a bitter confirmation of inherited trauma. Nony might well be a symbolic manifestation of Frances’s desire to cultivate nothingness. To the extent that she is a literal baby – I’m really not sure – Frances does seem to love her and care for her physical needs, even as she’s grateful that the relationship will be short-lived.
Diski draws attention to the falsity of her narrative technique at the very end. It’s a disturbing yet intriguing novel that I think must be trying to make a wider point about postwar disillusionment. (Enough to make one question one’s growing antipathy towards Boomers?) I was reminded faintly of Nutshell by Ian McEwan, which is from the perspective of a fetus, and I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf, a troubling story of a mentally ill mother and her disabled son. I have another novella plus a short story collection by Diski on the shelf, and I daresay after those I’ll have to seek out everything else she wrote. (University library)
Night Feeds and Morning Songs, ed. Ana Sampson (2021)
“I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.”
~Liz Berry
It would have been easy to make such an anthology samey and sentimental, so kudos to Sampson for curating a solid mix of contemporary and period work. The poems are grouped into loose categories covering pregnancy, the sleepless nights of early motherhood, the power of womanly solidarity, the legacy (or absence) of one’s own mother, and the milestones of life as a child grows up and moves away. (Jackie Kay marvels that her baby boy is now a 6-foot-2 world traveller.) However, there are almost as many emotional approaches and poetic forms as there are contributors. Exhilaration meets exhaustion; guilt and grief threaten to overwhelm the good times. Sometimes the infant is addressed directly. The tone might be sombre, outraged or satirical. A few excerpts:
from “Labour Ward Prayer” by Vicky Thomas
Give us this day our daily miracle.
Exchange our offering of sweat and tears
and, most of all, of blood,
for new life, crumpled as a new leaf bud.
from “The Visitor” by Idra Novey
…more dragon
than spaniel, more flammable
than fluid …
All wet mattress to my analysis,
he’s stayed the loudest and longest
of any houseguest
from “What My Kids Will Write about Me in Their Future Tell-All Book” by January Gill O’Neil
They will say that no was my favourite word,
More than stop, or eat, or love.
That some morning, I’d rather stay in bed,
laptop on lap, instead of making breakfast
…
They will say they have seen me naked.
Front side, back side – none of which
were my good side.
I enjoyed re-encountering work by some personal favourite poets such as Caroline Bird, though most entries were new to me. Sampson’s section introductions aren’t particularly illuminating and often reference poems that aren’t actually in the part in question. Some of the 19th-century and earlier material is quaintly twee, but I did love discovering Christina Rossetti’s “To My First Love, My Mother.” This is the poem that made me cry, though:
(Little Free Library)
And a bonus short story:
“Egg Mother” by Kim Samek (from I Am the Ghost Here): I’m two stories into Samek’s gently surreal collection. This second story combines the themes of parenting and grief prevalent above. Her openings are knockout: “At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg. It happens a few months after I give birth.” In therapy, the narrator discovers that she’s been repressing her grief over her mother, who died of cancer when the narrator was 13. The therapist suggests that she and her husband hold a joint ‘funeral’ for her mother and her younger self in a graveyard. But even after the ritual, she doesn’t return to herself. It’s a sobering but realistic message: some things one just doesn’t get over.
“Every story that I read becomes the story of my mother.”
~Timothy C. Baker
Last night, we saw Brooklyn expat singer-songwriter Annie Dressner (and Sean Duggan of Steady Habits) in concert at a church hall. I was mostly underwhelmed by her quirky confessional songs and little-girl voice, but a couple of songs stood out for me. One, “I Just Realized,” includes the line “And I hope that I can be just like my mother.”
Today was a more emotional day than I was expecting. I got a sweet posy from church, but having a whole service focussed on mothers and mothering was hard for me. I had to mostly switch off to get through it.
Just in my current stack, there are so many books about mothers or mothering…
the loss of a mother (Eva Luna by Isabel Allende; The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith) – so common an element in novels that I have to think it’s shorthand for a character who has to pluckily rely on their own psychological resources- mothers’ protective instinct (The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine)
- emotional distance from an unstable mother (Carrie by Stephen King; First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis; Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates; The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker, which also includes the struggle to be a good mother in turn)
- mixed feelings about the inability to have a child (Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth)
- a mother’s grief at the loss of a child (Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin)
I know it’s a subject I’ll be reading and thinking about for the rest of my life.
Three on a Theme: English Seasons and Flora (Brazier, Lamb and Parker)
These three books trace the turning of a typical year of the English seasons, especially as experienced through flora: produce for a veg stall, plants laid into a traditional hedge, and “weeds” celebrated for their wild beauty.
The Honesty Box: The diary of a broken marriage, a mental health crisis and a large marrow by Lucy Brazier (2025)
From one Christmas season to the next, Brazier highlights the delights and challenges of rural living (in the Bridport–Lyme Regis area of Dorset). She takes on a project of setting up and stocking her own honesty box – an unmanned roadside produce stall where visitors pay into a cashbox – with garden produce, preserves and baked goods, plus friends’ crafts. All along, her marriage is in an extended, low-level crisis: Steve’s bluntness, lack of social skills, and panicked inability to do his share of household tasks have long been issues. When he gets a combined ADHD and autism diagnosis, he has a roadmap but no easy solution. Going on medication and finding peers in a similar situation help somewhat, but he still struggles.
Brazier draws clever parallels between the turning of the seasons and the ebb and flow of a marriage. Wild swimming with friends and countryside walks with Margot the dog are ways of communing with nature. She incorporates all the daily concerns of her midlife existence, including home repairs, menopause and seeing Raff, the oldest of their three children, off to university. Brazier used to be a PFD talent agent in London, dealing with the likes of Anna Maxwell Martin, then worked for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his River Cottage cookery empire (she wrote their Christmas book); she’s now a freelance ghostwriter. She’s gently nostalgic for the days of balancing early motherhood and a stressful career, but also grateful for the slower pace of life she’s found in the countryside. There are also some amusingly ill-fated holidays (camping and boating), contrasted with a luxurious one in Italy.
It’s all very affable, the month-by-month present-tense write-ups offering an appealing blend of realism about life’s unpredictability and strategies for muddling through. While it may mean most to women of a certain age or those with neurodivergence in the family, anyone in a long-term relationship will find much to relate to. (Public library)
Of Thorn and Briar: A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer by Paul Lamb (2025)
I picked this up after it was shortlisted (and highly commended) for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. Lamb’s lifestyle could be from the 19th century: he lives in a sparse, cosy wagon, driving it from place to place and pausing for weeks-long projects laying traditional hedges across southwest England. Autumn through late winter is his key work period, to avoid the bird-nesting season. It’s gruelling physical labour. Sometimes he sees he’s made a difference; when he gets discouraged, he has to remind himself to take a longer view. “The hedger, like the forester, has to think of his work not as something completed in days or weeks or even months, but instead in years, decades and centuries.” Lamb can’t help but notice the daily shifts in weather adding up to changing seasons; it all affects his daily work.
This gets reasonably technical about the different qualities of tree species and what they’re like to work with. I learned, or at least was reminded of, the vocabulary word “pleaching,” which means cutting a thin tree trunk vertically – almost but not all the way through – and laying horizontal branches into the crease. It takes skill to describe practical actions in a way that laypeople can picture. However, this account, which covers one August through the following July, is quite monotonous and repetitive. I blame the simple past-tense narration, which quickly becomes an ‘I did this, then I did that’ rundown and had me skimming more than half of the time. Literary techniques would have helped break up the format: extended flashbacks to his apprenticeship or family life, more scenes and dialogue, and some lyrical or imagined passages. (There is one particularly nicely done Hardy-esque vignette where he converses with Dorset locals in a pub.)
During the pandemic, Lamb’s daughters encouraged him to start an Instagram account, which now has 195,000 followers. No doubt it was his social media fame that led to this book deal. His writing, though serviceable, lacks sparkle. I enjoyed it as a window onto a rare profession and nearly forgotten way of life, but would hesitate to recommend unless you have patience and a greater-than-average interest in the subject matter. (Public library)
Understorey: A Year Among Weeds by Anna Chapman Parker (2024)
(One of my best backlist reads of last year.) Parker set out to study and sketch weeds as a way of cultivating attention and stillness as well as celebrating the everyday and overlooked. Her quick black-and-white drawings and written observations bear witness to the seasons changing but also to the minute alterations she observes in herself and her children. Here are a couple of examples of shorter entries:
25 April
Wild garlic flowers are explosive. As so often in drawing[,] there is a slippery negotiation between fidelity (getting the shape right) and spirit (capturing the feel of it). By the third drawing I’ve got my eye in and the balance between the two is nearer the mark. If I stayed here a week in the grass, drawing a single flower in a single stroke with my eyes closed, maybe eventually I’d hit it bang-on true.
10 December
On my way back from the shops, I find myself detouring to check in on the sowthistle again. Its leaves are drier now and the crisping at the edges is spreading inward. The leftward lean is more pronounced. A few more of the flowers have gone over. But there’s something else, as well – some impression of a former intimacy. A sensation not only of the past flower, but of my past self here, two days ago. Through the drawn encounter, the plant allows me to recognise myself, passing.
Taking a half-hour out of her day to find a subject feels transgressive in one sense, but dutiful – even holy – in another. Along with her frequent illustrations, there are reproductions of other artworks that depict wildflowers in situ, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf (1503). The tone is high-brow, meditative, introspective as she focuses on being present. This was just my kind of nature book, and all the more special because I’ve holidayed in her home of Berwick-on-Tweed so could picture some of the ‘overgrown’ spaces she honours. 
With thanks to Duckworth for the proof copy for review.
Three on a Theme (Valentine’s Day): “Love” Books by Amy Bloom, George Mackay Brown & Hilary Mantel
Every year I say it: I’m really not a Valentine’s Day person and yet it’s become a tradition to put together a themed post featuring one or more books with “Love” or “Heart” in the title. This is the tenth year in a row, in fact – after 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. As you might expect, none of the three below contains a straightforward love story. The relationships portrayed tend to be unequal, creepy or doomed, but the solid character work and use of setting and voice was enough to keep me engaged with all of the books.
Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom (1997)
I’ve found Bloom’s short stories more successful than her novels. This is something of a halfway house: linked short stories (one of which was previously published in Come to Me; another that gives the title line to her 2000 collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You) about Elizabeth Taube. When we first meet her on Long Island in the 1960s, she’s a rebellious and sexually precocious Jewish girl; by the time we’ve journeyed through several decades of vignettes, she’s a flighty and psychologically scarred single mother. Stories of her Lolita-esque attractiveness to grown salesmen and teachers, her shoplifting, her casual work for elderly African American Mrs. Hill, and her great love for Horace, nicknamed Huddie, a Black basketball player, are in the first person. The longer second part – about the aftermath of her physical affair with Huddie and her ongoing emotional entanglement with her English teacher, Max Stone – is in the third person yet feels more honest. Liz seems like bad news for everyone she meets. Bloom shows us some of the reasons for what she does, but I still couldn’t absolve her protagonist. I’d also reverse the title: We Invent Love. Liz is responsible for irrevocably altering two lives besides her own based on what she needs to feel secure. This is very much Lorrie Moore territory, but Moore leaves less of a bitter taste. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project)
A Calendar of Love and Other Stories by George Mackay Brown (1967)
The title story opens a collection steeped in the landscape and history of Orkney. Each month we check in with three characters: Jean, who lives with her ailing father at the pub they run; and her two very different suitors, pious Peter and drunken Thorfinn. When she gives birth in December, you have to page back to see that she had encounters with both men in March. Some are playful in this vein or resemble folk tales: a boy playing hooky from school, a distant cousin so hapless as to father three bairns in the same household, and a rundown of the grades of whisky available on the islands. Others with medieval time markers are overwhelmingly bleak, especially “Witch,” about a woman’s trial and execution – and one of two stories set out like a play for voices. I quite liked the flash fiction “The Seller of Silk Shirts,” about a young Sikh man who arrives on the islands, and “The Story of Jorfel Hayforks,” in which a Norwegian man sails to find the man who impregnated his sister and keeps losing a crewman at each stop through improbable accidents. This is an atmospheric book I would have liked to read on location, but few of the individual stories stand out. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel (1995)
Mantel is best remembered for the Wolf Hall trilogy, but her early work includes a number of concise, sharp novels about growing up in the north of England. Carmel McBain attends a Catholic school in Manchester in the 1960s before leaving to study law at the University of London in 1970. In lockstep with her are a couple of friends, including Karina, who is of indeterminate Eastern European extraction and whose tragic Holocaust family history, added to her enduring poverty, always made her an object of pity for Carmel’s mother. But Karina as depicted by Carmel is haughty, even manipulative, and over the years their relationship swings between care and competition. As university students they live on the same corridor and have diverging experiences of schoolwork, romance, and food. “Now, I would not want you to think that this is a story about anorexia,” Carmel says early on, and indeed, she presents her condition as more like forgetting to eat. But then you recall tiny moments from her past when teachers and her mother shamed her for eating, and it’s clear a seed was sown. Carmel and her friends also deal with the results of the new-ish free love era. This is dark but funny, too, with Carmel likening roast parsnips to “ogres’ penises.” Further proof, along with Every Day Is Mother’s Day, that it’s well worth exploring authors’ back catalogue. (Public library)
Plus a DNF:
Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop (2013): I loved Bishop’s The Street, and this posthumous novel initially drew me in with its medical detail (two friends who both had stoma operations) and the exploration of different forms of love – romantic, parental, grandparental – before starting to feel obvious (two adoptions, one historical and one recent), maudlin and overlong. With some skimming, I made it to page 120. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Other relevant reading on the go:
I would have tried spinning this one into another thematic trio, but ran out of time…
A Rough Guide to the Heart by Pam Houston (1999): A mix of personal essays and short travel pieces. The material about her dysfunctional early family life, her chaotic dating, and her thrill-seeking adventures in the wilderness is reminiscent of the highly autobiographical Waltzing the Cat. Amusingly, this has a previous price label from Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, where it was incorrectly classed as Romance Fiction – one could be excused the mistake based on the title and cover! (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project)
And three books about marriage…
The Honesty Box by Lucy Brazier – A pleasant year’s diary of rural living and adjusting to her husband’s new diagnosis of neurodivergence.- Strangers by Belle Burden – A high-profile memoir about her husband’s strange and marriage-ending behaviour (his affair was only part of it) during the 2020 lockdown.
- Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell – For Literary Wives Club in March. I’m in the early pages but it seems comparable to Richard Yates.
Three on a Theme of Sylvia Plath (The Slicks by Maggie Nelson for #NonfictionNovember & #NovNov25; The Bell Jar and Ariel)
A review copy of Maggie Nelson’s brand-new biographical essay on Sylvia Plath (and Taylor Swift) was the excuse I needed to finally finish a long-neglected paperback of The Bell Jar and also get a taste of Plath’s poetry through the posthumous collection Ariel, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary. These are the sorts of works it’s hard to believe ever didn’t exist; they feel so fully formed and part of the zeitgeist. It also boggles the mind how much Plath accomplished before her death by suicide at age 30. What I previously knew of her life mostly came from hearsay and was reinforced by Euphoria by Elin Cullhed. For the mixture of nonfiction, fiction and poetry represented below, I’m counting this towards Nonfiction November’s Book Pairings week.
The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift by Maggie Nelson (2025)
Can young women embrace fame amidst the other cultural expectations of them? Nelson attempts to answer this question by comparing two figures who turn(ed) life into art. The link between them was strengthened by Swift titling her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. “Plath … serves as a metonym – as does Swift – for a woman who makes art about a broken heart,” Nelson writes. “When women make the personal public, the charge of whorishness always lurks nearby.” What women are allowed to say and do has always, it seems, attracted public commentary, and “anyone who puts their work into the world, at any level, must learn to navigate between self-protectiveness and risk, becoming harder and staying soft.”
Nelson acknowledges a major tonal difference between Plath and Swift, however. Plath longed for fame but didn’t get the chance to enjoy it; she’s the patron saint of sad-girl poetry and makes frequent reference to death, whereas Swift spotlights joy and female empowerment. It’s a shame this was out of date before it went to print; my advanced copy, at least, isn’t able to comment on Swift’s engagement and the baby rumour mill sure to follow. It would be illuminating to have an afterword in which Nelson discusses the effect of spouses’ competing fame and speculates on how motherhood might change Swift’s art.
Full confession: I’ve only ever knowingly heard one Taylor Swift song, “Anti-Hero,” on the radio in the States. (My assessment was: wordy, angsty, reasonably catchy.) Undoubtedly, I would have gotten more out of this essay were I equally familiar with the two subjects. Nonetheless, it’s fluid and well argued, and I was engaged throughout. If you’re a Swiftie as well as a literary type, you need to read this.
[66 pages]
With thanks to Vintage (Penguin) for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Given my love of mental hospital accounts and women’s autofiction, it’s a wonder I’d not read this before my forties. It was first published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” because Plath thought it immature, “an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” Esther Greenwood is the stand-in for Plath: a talented college student who, after working in New York City during the remarkable summer of 1953, plunges into mental ill health. Chapter 13 is amazing and awful at the same time as Esther attempts suicide thrice in one day, toying with a silk bathrobe cord and ocean waves before taking 50 pills and walling herself into a corner of the cellar. She bounces between various institutional settings, undergoing electroshock therapy – the first time it’s horrible, but later, under a kind female doctor, it’s more like it’s ‘supposed’ to be: a calming reset.
The 19-year-old is obsessed with the notion of purity. She has a couple of boyfriends but decides to look for someone else to take her virginity. Beforehand, the asylum doctor prescribes her a fitting for a diaphragm. A defiant claim to the right to contraception despite being unmarried is a way of resisting the bell jar – the rarefied prison – of motherhood. Still, Esther feels guilty about prioritizing her work over what seems like feminine duty: “Why was I so maternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby? … I was my own woman.” Plath never reconciled parenthood with poetry. Whether that’s the fault of Ted Hughes, or the times they lived in, who can say. For her and for Esther, the hospital is a prison as well – but not so hermetic as the turmoil of her own mind. How ironic to read “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am” knowing that this was published just a few weeks before this literary genius ceased to be.
Apart from an unfortunate portrayal of a “negro” worker at the hospital, this was an enduringly relevant and absorbing read, a classic to sit alongside Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow and Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water.
(Secondhand – it’s been in my collection so long I can’t remember where it’s from, but I’d guess a Bowie Library book sale or Wonder Book & Video / Public library – I was struggling with the small type so switched to a recent paperback and found it more readable)
Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)
Impossible not to read this looking for clues of her death to come:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
(from “Lady Lazarus”)
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
(from “Years”)
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment
(from “Edge”)
I feel incapable of saying anything fresh about this collection, which takes no prisoners. The images and vocabulary are razor-sharp. First and last lines or stanzas are particularly memorable. (“Morning Song” starts “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”; “Lady Lazarus” ends “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”) Words and phrases repeat and gather power as they go. “The Applicant” mocks the obligations of a wife: “A living doll … / It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, talk. … // … My boy, it’s your last resort. / Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” I don’t know a lot about Plath’s family life, only that her father was a Polish immigrant and died after a long illness when she was eight, but there must have been some daddy issues there – after all, “Daddy” includes the barbs “Daddy, I have had to kill you” and “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” It ends, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Several later poems in a row, including “Stings,” incorporate bee-related imagery, and Plath’s father was an international bee expert. I can see myself reading this again and again in future, and finding her other collections, too – all but one of them posthumous. (Secondhand – RSPCA charity shop, Newbury)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 