Recommended March Releases by Jane Aldous, Danielle Evans, Katherine May & Genanne Walsh
Sonnets, short stories, nature-fuelled wonder, and an autobiographical essay about a father’s death … from postwar Edinburgh to modern-day San Francisco and from fiction about young African American women to pilgrimages along the English coast, I have a real variety to recommend this month. (And coming up in a separate post: Womb by Leah Hazard.)
More Patina than Gleam by Jane Aldous
This was my second Arachne Press collection after Routes by Rhiya Pau. Intriguingly, it’s a story composed of 70 sonnets, untraditional in that they do not follow a particular rhyme scheme apart from the odd couplet. There is scant punctuation, with within-line spaces separating the phrases. Aldous, who has recently been featured in a Guardian article on debut authors over 60, imagines a sort of alternative future for her mother had she run away with her when she was a baby. Here, Linda escapes her abusive common-law husband, Vernon, and travels from England to Edinburgh with her 11-year-old daughter, Angie. They settle with an eccentric older woman named Elsie Datlow, who hires Linda as a lady’s companion and keeps her on as a housekeeper when financial struggles force her to accept paying guests. It’s impressive how much Aldous fits into comparatively little text, including Angie’s coming of age, the ups and downs of the Datlows’ picture restoring business, and transgressive romance as both Elsie and Linda fall in love across accepted gender or racial boundaries. This was a pleasant surprise that called to mind works by Muriel Spark and Sarah Waters.
With thanks to Arachne Press for the free copy for review.
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans (2010)
A couple of years ago I reviewed Evans’s second short story collection, The Office of Historical Corrections. This was her first book but has only just been published in the UK. Six of the eight stories are in the first person, the other two in third person. The protagonists tend to be young African American women in moments of transition or clinging to unhealthy relationships. In “Virgins,” 15-year-old Erica and Jasmine want to shed their innocence but can’t necessarily control how it happens. “Snakes” has Tara, a transracial adoptee, spending her ninth summer with her white cousin, Allison, down at their grandmother’s home in Florida. The response to a series of accidents makes it clear to her who is valued in this family. The college girls in “Harvest” consider a variety of reproductive experiences, from selling their eggs to abortion. In “The King of a Vast Empire,” a brother and sister decide to track down a survivor of a car accident their family had when they were children. “Jellyfish” sees a father and daughter meeting for lunch in Harlem and pondering their separate futures.
Many settings were familiar to me from the Delmarva area where I grew up. Here on the cusp of the South, Confederate sympathy still exists, as high schoolers Crystal and Geena discover in “Robert E. Lee Is Dead.” The best friends collaborate on pranks, but Crystal’s grades point to a promising future whereas everyone has given up on Geena, including herself. Along with that one, my two favourites were “Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go” and “Wherever You Go, There You Are.” In the former, military veteran Georgie tries to ingratiate himself with his ex-girlfriend by treating her daughter to a princess experience; in the latter, Carla takes her would-be-sexpot 14-year-old niece, Chrissie, on a road trip to North Carolina to meet her ex’s fiancée. Both are exemplary of the assets of the whole collection: strong characters, natural dialogue, and subtle treatment of themes of class and race. I’d proffer this for fans of Sidik Fofana, and as a better option than Dantiel Moniz’s stories.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
Enchantment: Reawakening wonder in an exhausted age by Katherine May
I was a big fan of Katherine May’s Wintering, which published just before the pandemic and, as if presciently, offers strategies for coping with seasons of depression. Coming after a few years of upheaval and disconnection, this follow-up voices May’s longing for rituals of the transcendent that will allow her to live in harmony and close attention to the world around her. Her usual way of communing with nature and other people was group swims in the sea, but that temporarily stopped with lockdown. She sought alternatives, such as visiting a sacred well with a friend, beekeeping, cultivating a wild garden, and chasing a meteor shower. The Earth – Water – Fire – Air structure is sometimes forced, and the content sparse; like Raynor Winn, May, I feel, was pressured to capitalize on the success of her previous work and quickly publish unfinished and rather nebulous material. It’s all surprisingly woo-woo from an English author. Yet May’s writing is unfailingly lovely and this went down easy a chapter at a time. It’s a comparable read to Wanderland by Jini Reddy.
With thanks to Faber for the proof copy for review.
Eggs in Purgatory by Genanne Walsh
I reviewed Genanne Walsh’s novel Twister as part of my summer reading in 2018. This autobiographical essay, recently published by WTAW Press and a finalist in their Alcove Chapbook Series Open, tells the story of the last few months of her father’s life. Aged 89, he lived downstairs from Walsh and her wife in San Francisco. He was quite the character: idealist, stubborn, outspoken; a former Catholic priest influenced by A Course in Miracles and convinced of the oneness of everything. Although he had no terminal conditions, he was sick of old age and its indignities and ready to exit. (“He wanted to be put on an ice floe and pushed offshore. The problem was, I lived above him on the iceberg and would be tasked with shoving him off.”) However, there was confusion about California state laws and whether doctors could help him with this, and at one point the police showed up at the door.
The title refers to a Middle Eastern dish (see this Nigella Lawson recipe) I’ve known as shakshuka. It was the last proper meal her father ate, Christmas morning 2017 with her and her wife, before he went on his final hunger strike. Later Walsh writes, “Mourning is a kind of purgatory. You exist between worlds. For a long time I walked through, not fully feeling the world of the living or the world of the dead but aware of both.”
The task of a memoir is to fully mine the personal details of a situation but make of it something universal, and that’s just what she does here. Her father’s past with her mother (who died decades before, following a stroke) renders the family dynamic a backdrop to a final pyrrhic battle. Aware that she doesn’t come out of this a saint, Walsh admits to contradictory feelings, including “my life will be so much easier when he dies.” The prediction, no less than its reality, makes her feel guilty. Though she has no faith as such, she senses her father’s influence in her very desire to keep communing with him after his death.
This stunning little book met me at a deep place and I can highly recommend it, especially if you were a fan of In Love by Amy Bloom and All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay. (See also The Inevitable – one of its case studies reminded me of this.)
With thanks to the author for the free e-copy for review.
And one dud:
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton – This year’s Klara and the Sun for me: I have trouble remembering why I was so excited about Catton’s third novel that I put it on my Most Anticipated list for 2023, especially given my decidedly mixed feelings about The Luminaries. I’d read a lot about Birnam Wood so its plot held no surprises for me. An American tech billionaire is up to no good on a New Zealand nature reserve; though the members of a guerrilla gardening group summon courage to fight back, his drones see all.
From early on I had little interest in the cast and their doings, especially the buzzword-filled dialogues, and skimmed the rest. Literary fiction usually distinguishes itself from commercial genre fiction by its focus on character depth (and prose quality), but in Catton’s case that was achieved through endless backstory. Her attempt at edginess entails adding at least one F-word to each spoken sentence. (The Bookshop Band, usually so mild-mannered, reflected this by dropping an F-bomb in their song based on the book – see the music video, which cleverly employs a derelict greenhouse and drones.) I’d heard that the ending was a knockout, so I skipped ahead and did find the last 40 pages gripping and the gruesome final tableau worthy of the Shakespearean allusions, but there’s a lot of blah to wade through before that.
With thanks to Granta for the free copy for review.
Would you be interested in reading one or more of these?
January Releases, Part III: Taylor Harris, Cathy Rentzenbrink & Tanya Shadrick
Rounding off my three-part look at some of the month’s new releases with two memoirs plus a memoir-writer’s self-help guide today. (Can you tell I’m a memoir junkie?) Topics range from medical mysteries and covert racism to a reclaiming of life after a near-death experience, but these three nonfiction works by women are linked by the determination to overcome self-doubt.
This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown by Taylor Harris
One morning, Taylor Harris and her husband (an African American family based in Charlottesville, Virginia) found their 22-month-old son Christopher, nicknamed “Tophs,” awake but unresponsive in his crib. In the years that followed, she and his doctors looked for answers as to why his body couldn’t regulate his blood sugar levels, sometimes leading to seizures, and to why his speech and mental processing remained delayed. All their tests and theories have never amounted to a conclusive diagnosis. This was a book that repeatedly surprised me. I’d assumed it would be exclusively about the medical mystery of Tophs’s physical and intellectual disability. But Harris elegantly weaves in a lot of other themes, too: mental illness, her own physical concerns (a BRCA2 mutation), racism, faith, and advocating for her children’s health and education. (Full review at BookBrowse.)
Write It All Down: How to put your life on the page by Cathy Rentzenbrink
Cathy Rentzenbrink is a lovely human being, and I’ve always appreciated her enthusiastic support of books. I’ve read all of her work even though I’ve been disappointed with her last few releases. There are so many writing guides out there – including several on memoir-writing specifically – that the first question to ask about one is, does it offer anything new? For me, this one doesn’t. In fact, it’s more of a therapy session than a practical writing guide.
The undemanding prose slides right down, but 60 pages in (at the end of Part One, “Preparation”) I realized all we’d had thus far was enumerating and countering the hang-ups of unconfident, procrastinating would-be writers. The rest of the book does then get into the nitty-gritty of producing a first draft (“Excavation”) of a life story and editing it into a more polished form. Rentzenbrink peppers in little tricks to keep oneself at the desk, like setting a timer or micro-goals, writing a section in the form of a letter, and dredging up sensory details. Most of the mini chapters are just a couple of pages. Several end with a series of prompts. I’m notorious for skipping the application questions in self-help books, but I’d be interested to hear if other readers have actually gone through these exercises and found them helpful.
I’m so familiar with the author’s own story from her three autobiographical works that I was less than patient about encountering certain incidents again here – though I was intrigued to learn that she gave up alcohol in the recent past after realizing that she was a problem drinker. I’ve also read most of the material in her Further Reading list; all told, I didn’t feel this book offered me much, as a lay reader or a maybe-some-day memoirist. But it seems to have been enormously popular among critics and readers (its average Goodreads rating is 4.38), so clearly a lot of people have been finding Rentzenbrink’s down-to-earth approach reassuring.
With thanks to Emma Finnigan PR and Bluebird for the proof copy for review.
The Cure for Sleep: Memoir of a Late-Waking Life by Tanya Shadrick
From my Most Anticipated list. Shadrick hangs around the fringes of nature writing cliques on Twitter, so I expected this to have more of a nature/travel element. Instead, it bears a fairy tale ambience, of a little girl lost in the woods and craving freedom; of a sleepwalking woman deciding to live more deliberately. It opens with a near-death experience: Shadrick, new mother to a son conceived after infertility treatment, suffered a severe haemorrhage after the placenta tore an artery and was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery.
From this point she returns to the beginning of her life and proceeds chronologically, pausing at joyful or traumatic moments. Her childhood feels like the key to understanding everything else: her father left when she was a baby; her mother, all too aware of being of lower class, was driven to improve herself. Shadrick wanted her mother all to herself, at the same time as she felt trapped by her. She injured herself jumping off an outhouse roof in protest at her mother’s new boyfriend, who became her stepfather. At university she reacted against her upbringing in predictable ways, failing her first year and having an abortion. Even once happily married, she kept unconsciously searching for surrogate father (older male) figures.
After the postnatal operation, she felt a need to escape – by suicide if necessary – yet forced herself to stay, make connections in her town and be present for her children. But she remained a free spirit, swimming and writing a mile-long scroll as public performance art. Her work with hospice patients, recording their memories, qualified her to edit Lynne Roper’s wild swimming diaries into a Wainwright Prize-longlisted book.
Awakening versus sleep is the figurative framework for the memoir, with a feminist insistence on freedom and self-fulfilment at the same time as being a mother. This is an unusual book – at times overwritten and too deliberately moulded into tropes as a rebuttal to randomness, even though, looking back, I can’t decipher a coherent plot to the events – that reminded me most of Free Woman by Lara Feigel and I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell.
With thanks to W&N for the free copy for review.
Does one of these books appeal to you?
A Spate of Swimming Memoirs
In the first four months of this year, I got my hands on no fewer than four swimming memoirs. For the upcoming July/August issue of Foreword Reviews magazine I’ve reviewed Floating: A Life Regained by Joe Minihane, in which the author recreates the late nature writer Roger Deakin’s wild swimming journeys from Waterlog (1999) in an attempt to overcome anxiety; I have Leap In by Alexandra Heminsley on my Kindle; and I read roughly the first 60 pages of a library copy of Al Álvarez’s 2013 Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal.
For now, I’m featuring Turning by Jessica J. Lee, which has strong similarities to these other memoirs – especially Minihane’s – but is its own beautifully reflective personal story. The book arose from Lee’s resolution, when she was 28 and in Berlin on a research placement for her dissertation in environmental history, to swim in 52 local lakes – a year’s worth – no matter the weather. At the time she blogged about her “52 Lakes Project” for Slow Travel Berlin, and kept friends and family up to date through social media as well. Her focus would be on the former East German region of Brandenburg, which has Berlin at its center and was first popularized by Theodor Fontane’s 1862 travel book.
Lee traveled to the lakes under her own steam, using trains and her bicycle; occasionally she took friends with her, but most often she was alone, which became a chance to cultivate solitude – not the same as loneliness. The challenge entailed all kinds of practical difficulties like bike trouble, getting lost, and a dead phone battery, but gradually it became routine and held less fear for her. On summer days she could manage multiple lakes in a day, and even small encounters with Germans gave her a newfound sense of belonging.
Within chapters, the memoir gracefully alternates pieces of the author’s past with her lake travels. With a father from Wales and a mother from Taiwan, Lee grew up in Ontario and spent summers in Florida. She remembers taking YMCA swimming lessons alongside her mother, and swimming in Canadian lakes. Back then the water usually intimidated her, but over the years her feelings have changed:
Water feels different in each place. The water I grew up with was hard, cutting, and when I go back to visit it now, I feel it in my ears when I dive in. something different, more like rock. The lake a whetted blade. The water in Berlin has a softness to it. Maybe it’s the sand, buffing the edges off the water like splinters from a beam. It slips over you like a blanket. There’s a safety in this feeling. In the lakes here, there is a feeling of enclosure and security that Canada can’t replicate. And it shouldn’t – the pelagic vastness there is entirely its own, and I’ve learned to love that too.
Swimming fulfills many functions for Lee. It served variously as necessary discipline after going mildly off the rails in young adulthood (drinking, smoking pot and having an abortion during college; a short-lived marriage in her early twenties); as a way of bouncing back from depression when her planned life in London didn’t pan out and a budding relationship failed; and as a way of being in touch with the turning seasons and coming to know the German landscape intimately. Symbolically, of course, it’s also a baptism into a new life.
Yet I had to wonder if there was also something masochistic about this pursuit, especially in the winter months. On the back cover there’s a photograph of Lee using a hammer to chip out a path through the ice so she can do her minimum of 45 strokes. (No wetsuit!) As spring came, ironically, the water felt almost too warm to her. She had learned to master the timing of a winter swim: “Between pain and numbness there’s a brightness, a crisp, heightened sensation in the cold: that’s the place to swim through. When it ends, when numbness arrives, it’s time to get out.”
The end of Lee’s year-long project is bittersweet, but she’s consoled by the fact that she didn’t have to leave her ordinary life in order to complete it. It was a companion alongside the frantic last-minute work on her dissertation and it never got in the way of her relationships; on the contrary, it strengthened certain friendships. And with Berlin looking like her home for the foreseeable future, she’s committed to seeking out more lakes, too.
There are a lot of year quest books out there, but this one never feels formulaic because there’s such a fluid intermingling of past and present. As memoirs go, it is somewhat like Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun – but much better. It’s also comparable to Angela Palm’s Riverine, with a watery metaphor at the heart to reflect the author’s conception of life as a meandering route. Unlike the other swimming memoirs I’ve sampled, I can recommend this one to a general reader with no particular interest in wild swimming or any other sport. It’s for you if you enjoy reading about the ebb and flow of women’s lives.
In the stillness of the lakes, the border between nature and culture is thinned. Swimming takes place at this border, as if constantly searching for home. Water is a place in which I don’t belong, but where I find myself nonetheless. Out of my culture, out of my depth.
There is more space inside than I can imagine, more hope and possibility than I’d known. Feeling as clear as the day, as deep as the lake.
Turning: A Swimming Memoir was published in the UK by Virago on May 4th. My thanks to the publisher for sending a free copy for review.
My rating: 
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 