memoir

Northern Farm, by Henry Beston

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From the writer-naturalist author of The Outermost House, comes an invitation to share in the daily life of a farm in Maine. I found this book so comforting that I stretched it out over a couple of months, only reading one or two short chapters first thing in the day.

Looking for a quieter life than could be found in the Boston suburbs, Henry Beston and his wife, writer Elizabeth Coatsworth, moved to Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, Maine, in the 1930s and lived there for the rest of their lives.

Published in 1948, the book describes a life I thought long gone: heating with wood, using horse-drawn farm  equipment, finding dirt roads impassable in mud season, gathering for community suppers at the grange, and—most heartening—neighbors clad in red-plaid flannel helping each other out with seasonal chores. Yet when I moved to Vermont a few years ago, I found all this and more. Yes, even horses being used instead of tractors on some farms.

Home again from a visit to friends in town, glad to be back where everything doesn’t come into the house along a wire or down a pipe. What a relief it was to get into my farm clothes and have a reasonable amount of physical work to do!

These chapters, which take us through a single year on the farm, originated as a series of country-living columns in The Progressive. Each starts with a few pages full of closely observed description of Beston’s surroundings and often something of his activities that day. Here is an excerpt from a winter walk.

Then, even as I looked, something touched me on the shoulder with a new awareness, and the scene became transformed. The shadows which were but shadows turned to pools of a deep gentian blue, a color tranquil and serene, and the water, which had been but water in snow pool close beside the shadows, became a mirror of some blue and glowing vault of heaven—this other blue being as pure as the first, but perhaps more bright, and with the brightness a measure more delicate. By contrast the sky beyond both the pool and the winter shadows appeared more green. The sun shone, there was no sound, and there I was standing in the road and staring at two of the most beautiful appearances of color in Nature which I think I have ever seen. Only a ridge of purest white snow separated the shadows from the pool.

 It was as if Nature, in the depth of our winter, had called into being the delicate colors of a garden.

That section is followed by excerpts from his Farm Diary, scraps of details that evoke daily life on the land and in the community. Each chapter closes with a paragraph or two of philosophy, sometimes referencing his lifelong theme of cultivating a closer communion with the natural world.

Who would live happily in the country must be wisely prepared to take great pleasure in little things. Country living is a pageant of Nature and the year; it can no more stay fixed than a movement in music, and as the seasons pass, they enrich life far more with little things than with great, with remembered moments rather than hours. A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.

I’ve also been reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which many of you have probably already read. She draws on her own Potawatomi heritage and her scientific training as a botanist to describe—beautifully—a way of relating to the land and its plants and trees with respect and gratitude.

Both have been a balm during this terrible time, reminding me of the good in people and what is worth defending.

What are you reading to prepare for next month’s Earth Day?

A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, by Rumer Godden

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In my search for comfort reads to give me a rest from what’s going on in our world, I’ve turned to Rumer Godden, whose novels are set in earlier times and places. I’m looking forward to rereading old favorites like The Greengage Summer, and in the meantime picked up this memoir of her early life. I completely ignored the note that it covers the years from her birth in 1907 to 1946, thus landing me once again in the experience of a woman at least temporarily distant from Hitler’s reign of terror.

As Godden sets out to trace the beginnings of her life as a writer and her formative influences, one theme that emerges immediately is the contrast between her charmed childhood in Narayanganj—then part of colonial India, now Bangladesh—and her stints in England. In India, where her father worked as a shipping company executive, children were “left to grow” where in England they were “brought up.” When she and her sister Jon as tweens were briefly sent to their aunts, “[f]or the first time we had to live by rules, strict rules.”

Throughout her life in India, she ignored the privileged cocoon of the members of the British Raj in favor of getting to know the local people. As it turned out, she was thus able to store up experiences she later drew on in her novels. Her unconventional attitude sometimes landed her in trouble, such as when she starts a dance school in town. “In Calcutta’s then almost closed society, ‘nice girls’ did not work or try to earn their living.”

She had to start the dance school because her charming but irresponsible husband had recklessly run up debts that ate up all of her income from her surprisingly successful novel Black Narcissus.  She chose to live apart from him for much of their marriage, her struggles as—essentially—a single parent again taking her outside the bounds of convention.

Godden’s prose did indeed carry me away. Her vivid descriptions of people and places and her extraordinary encounters make the story come to life. She also intersperses excerpts from her diary and letters to capture the essence of the moment.

In 1942, with the war affecting Calcutta, she and her children move to Kashmir as an “abandoned family,” meaning the family of a soldier normally stationed in India but serving abroad in wartime. They were more abandoned than most, since her husband spent all of his pay on himself and couldn’t be bothered with them. The place where the British government housed them in Srinigar was rife with disease, forcing her to take the children first to a houseboat and then to Dove House, a dilapidated building isolated up a steep mountain path.

The path went up to a knoll where a gap in a baked-earth wall served as a front gate; inside the wall spread a garden of terraces and fruit trees which led to a rough lawn and there, set so perfectly that it seemed to nestle into the side of the mountain, was the house. It was built of pink-grey stone with a wooden verandah and a roof of wooden shingles. Beside it the stream fell from terrace to terrace and in front, rising almost as high as a gabled window in the roof, was a magnolia, one of the slender kind that would have white flowers and purple buds.

Their life in Dove House is extremely primitive, since she has almost no money. But in fact that is where she learns the difference between her circumstances and the true poverty of the local people. For example, when winter finally turns to spring, she is so enchanted by the blossoming almond trees that she breaks off a spray to bring home, eliciting a frown from her gardener/car.etaker

“It’s only one spray.”

“You do not know what it is to be poor,” said Nabir Das.

Further experiences reinforce this lesson. As once a single parent living in poverty myself, I felt equally chastened. As we teeter on the edge of catastrophe, I draw strength from remembering how much worse it can be and has been. It may yet be, but for now I’m ready to return to the fight.

What comfort reads have you found? What strength have you drawn from them?

A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter

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Translated by Jane Degras

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria to join her husband Hermann in Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, which lies between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It is one of the most northern inhabited places on the planet. Hermann has been spending increasing amounts of time there, hunting and trapping, and as a result has found a new serenity. Christiane is there to stay with him for a year in a tiny hut, the size of a large closet, where they are joined by a young hunter named Karl.

If 1934 makes your ears perk up, you recall that in August 1934 Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency into the title of Führer, thus completing his rise to power. Christiane almost never mentions the politics back home where their democracy is being demolished by a dictator, partly because she is too isolated to hear more than a few random scraps of news, and partly because she is absorbed by her new life. Many of us dream of such isolation these days as our own democracy is attacked.

Before leaving, she imagined she would spend her time there reading books, sleeping a lot, and darning socks. But she quickly learns otherwise. There’s a reason the nearby coasts are called Anxiety Hook, Distress Hook, Misery Bay and Bay of Grief.

The closest neighbor is 60 miles away, and even they are inaccessible in the winter’s depths. She and Hermann have brought some provisions, but mostly rely on what they kill. Her description of preparing her first seal dinner is eye-opening. She is sometimes left alone for days and weeks while the men hunt, and she begins to grasp the “terror of nothingness”  that has driven men—and at least one woman, or so the story goes—mad.

Now everything around us is quite dead; even the battering of the storm has ceased. A heavy mist weighs on everything; the hut is shrouded in stillness and darkness. It seems to me as if only now has the real night fallen, and slowly my courage begins to seep away. Perhaps the sun will never come back again. Perhaps it is dark all over the world.

Yet hard as life in the Arctic is, she finds much to appreciate, especially as an artist.  Describing the early morning, she says, “The whole sky is deep lilac, lightening into a tender cobalt blue at the horizon, over the sea of ice. From the east a pale-yellow brightness spreads, and the frozen sea, reflecting the heavenly colours, shines like an immense opal.” 

In one passage I loved, she compares the twilight at the beginning of the Arctic night with ‘the delicate, wonderful paintings of the Chinese painter—monks, in which the immense and mysterious effect is achieved entirely by gradations from light to dark grey, by forms indicated rather than outlined.’

She finds herself changing. “Why have I been so shaken by the peacefulness of nature?” She even comes to appreciate the isolation.

I am conscious of the immense solitude around me. There is nothing that is like me, no creature in whose aspect I might retain a consciousness of my own self; I feel that the limits of my being are being lost in this all-too-powerful nature, and for the first time I have a sense of the divine gift of companionship.

I appreciate all the details of daily life. Her first responsibility is as a housewife, wrestling with the cracked stove that is their only source of heat, sewing curtains from a scrap of fabric once used as a sail. Nothing is wasted. Driftwood logs are propped against the hut to keep it from being blown away. Paths must be shoveled again every day.

There are gaps in the story. We don’t know why Hermann started spending so much time there, when it seems he and Cristiane have a close relationship. They have a teenaged daughter back in Austria, mentioned once, I believe, but we don’t know how Christiane feels about leaving her for a year. I also wondered how Christiane felt when she learned that Karl would be joining them, though she does show us how grateful she is for his help as the year continues.

The book is written as a journal, mostly in the present tense, so we live through her year of changes with her. I love winter, the cold, and the snow, though I think the hut in Spitsbergen would be beyond even me. I loved the book, though, for its appreciation of the natural world and our place in it, and for the brief escape into a simpler, more rigorous life.

What book have you escaped into recently?

After Long Silence, by Helen Fremont

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In this 1999 memoir, Helen Fremont recounts her discovery at thirty-five that everything she thought she knew about her family was wrong. Raised Roman Catholic in a small midwestern town, she knew that her parents had emigrated from Poland, but they rarely spoke about the war or the death of their own parents. Only as an adult, practicing law in Boston, did she discover that her parents were in fact Jewish and Holocaust survivors.

What a sense of betrayal, to find that your parents have been lying to you all of your life. She and her sister Lara want to know more, which sends them digging for tiny scraps of information, following threads that they could begin to weave into the story of the past. The secrets they uncover are appalling.

Their father Kovik spent six years in the Soviet gulag, thinking that the woman he’d fallen in love with back in Poland—Batya—must be either dead or have forgotten him. Meanwhile, she was trying to save her parents as they all suffered starvation and abuse. She eventually relents enough to tell her daughter the story of one pogrom, in the courtyard of her own grade school.

The story moves back and forth between the present and the past, as we discover her parents’ live as she does. I love the Author’s Note at the beginning, because with a memoir it’s important to be honest with your readers about how much your imagination is filling in the gaps.

This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed the names, locations, and identifying characteristics of a number of individuals in order to protect their privacy. In some instances, I have imagined details in an effort to convey the emotional truths of my family’s experiences.

Later she writes about her doubts about the information they’ve pried out of their mother.

I wondered about everything now. The more I knew the more I wondered. If you open one door, a thousand other doors creak open. At least, there were two of us, Lara and I, tiptoeing through this wobbly past, doused with the blood of relatives we only now were getting to know. Lara gave me the courage to face our parents and our past.

In the memoir classes I teach, people often ask about revealing things that hurt others. We are not the only people in our memoirs. Here, Fremont’s parents resist being outed as Jewish. No wonder, when that identity meant terror and torture and death.

My own parents, with a surname that could be thought Jewish, did everything they could to make sure everyone knew they were not. It could have been prejudice, but the reason they gave me was that they wanted to protect us children from what they had seen while serving in World War II. If they were still alive today, they would be horrified by the current threats to create concentration camps here in the U.S. Perhaps they’d derive some satisfaction from saying I told you so.

Kovik’s and Batya’s escapes from the gulag and occupied Poland respectively make for thrilling reading. It’s no surprise they wanted to put those desperate and traumatic years behind them and pose as an ordinary Catholic couple. Was Fremont wrong to write this book and reveal their secrets? Judging from her sequel, the book caused them terrible pain. True, the main thread is her story of discovery, yet much of the content recounts the lives of her parents. If nothing else, this story shows the way secrets held too long fester and damage our most precious ties.

Can you recommend a memoir in which family secrets surface and cause big trouble?

Ghostland, by Edward Parnell

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Subtitled In Search of a Haunted Country, this unusual book combines travelogue, literary review, and memoir. England is that country, home to nearly all of the ghost stories I grew up on and to the legends that fired my imagination as a child. Parnell sets out to revisit the ghost stories that have been meaningful to him throughout his life, and actually go to the places where they are set or were written.

I felt as though I were making this journey with him. As he takes us to these places, he shares not only their sometimes beautiful, sometimes eerie atmosphere, but also his own memories of visiting them as a child with his family or later on birding expeditions with his brother Chris. He introduces us to the writer associated with the place and one or two of their stories. This is no dry, academic tome, but rather a genial, engaging story, as though we were in a pub somewhere listening to a fascinating storyteller.

Hard as it was to put down, I spent most of December reading this book because I kept stopping to find and read stories and books that Parnell discusses. Many of the authors, stories and places are old friends of mine. Some were new to me, all or in part. For example, I didn’t know that Rudyard Kipling had written ghost stories. I loved being introduced to The Children of Green Knowe, and returning to old haunts in the fen country and Arthurian-haunted Cornwall and Dorset.

Most of all, I enjoyed revisiting W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a formative book for me, and similar in some ways to this book, being also a combination travelogue, memoir and collection of curious information. Parnell refers to a particular scene which

. . . cuts to the heart of Sebald’s work and his exploration of how we, both individually and collectively, come to forget (or at least suppress) the losses we have suffered, the memories of people and events that once came to us to us with such clarity, and the atrocities to which we are in some part complicit.

With this book, though, we are doing just the opposite: exploring the memories that haunt us. I was most moved by a story new to me: “Pirates,” by E. F. Benson, in which a fifty-six-year-old, successful business man comes across his childhood home, now abandoned and beginning to decay. The man becomes obsessed with buying and restoring it, recreating the happy home of his youth, returning even the furniture and other items now in his London home. The story gave me a jolt of recognition for I often dream that I’ve discovered my own beloved childhood home, miraculously not destroyed after all, and that I can buy it and, indeed, return these items from my current home to their rightful places. Then I wake up.

There is something about this time of year that makes me turn to ghost stories. Of course, traditionally the solstice and Christmas Eve are moments when the veil between the living and the dead thins, and perhaps disappears. And there’s something about ghost stories and England. Parnell mentions the Happisburgh footprints discovered in 2013 in Norfolk, England. Dating to the end of the Early Pleistocene, they are the oldest known hominid footprints discovered outside of Africa.

Although only in his late thirties, Parnell has suffered great losses: the deaths of both parents and Chris, his only sibling, leaving him—as one of my friends said of herself—the Last of the Mohicans. He talks about the period during and after the Great War, with its huge loss of life, when those desperate to see again their lost loved ones embraced Spiritualism. One of the themes that lends power to this story is the question of how best to heal from grief. Can we really sense something of them lingering around us? Do we hold onto our dead or let them go?

And of course there are the attendant themes around memory: what we hold onto and what we suppress, why these particular memories stay with us, even though at the time the incidents may have seemed inconsequential. As the year dies, I think about death and welcome my ghosts. I believe this is a book I will return to every December.

Who or what haunts you?

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

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Chung’s debut memoir explores several important themes. Her parents—Korean shopkeepers with two daughters already—were warned that the premature baby might not live and if she did, was likely to have expensive disabilities. They decided to offer her up for adoption, and a white couple who badly wanted children brought her home to Portland, Oregon.

She accepted the story her new parents told her, of the selflessness of her birth parents and that adoption had been the best thing for her. Her religious parents told her that she was a “divinely ordered” gift from God. However, they did not see the racist bullying that Chung encountered in Portland, one of the least racially diverse places in the U.S. Their parents’ colorblind insistence that they didn’t think of her as Asian also meant that she did not learn about Korean culture or language.

“Sometimes the adoption — the abandonment, as I could not help but think of it when I was very young — upset me more; sometimes my differences did; but mostly, it was both at once, race and adoption, linked parts of my identity that set me apart from everyone else in my orbit. I could neither change nor deny these facts, so I worked to reconcile myself to them.”

It was only as an adult, pregnant with her first child, that Chung began to question the legend and to begin discreetly searching for her birth parents. “It was time to lay down the burden of being ‘the good adoptee,’ the grateful little girl who’d been lost and then found.” At the same time she did not want to hurt the parents she loved and whom she would always call Mom and Dad.

I appreciated Chung’s openness in writing her journey and also her compassion toward all of the people involved. The themes of the search for identity, adoption in general, and interracial adoption in particular are important ones, and Chung provides much insight into one person’s experience of them.

However, I’m surprised by the awards and praise for this book It might have been better as an essay. Yes, it’s a super important topic, but there’s a lot of repetition and the narration is rather dry. She includes few scenes along with some scenelets (short snippets of scenes). Instead, Chung tells us this story, summarising the events and dwelling on her thoughts and emotions rather than showing us what happened.

Chung herself is an editor, first at The Toast magazine and then becoming editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine in 2016, whose book division published this memoir. In her Acknowledgments, she thanks her editor before anyone else, so I remain a bit baffled by the final product.

Still, Chung gets so much right with this book: genuine emotion, vulnerability and loving compassion for the parents who gave her away and those who raised her.

Have you read a book about adoption that made you think more deeply about the issues involved?

The Years, by Annie Ernaux

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Writing guru Donald Maass—writer, agent, and writing teacher—reminds us to include what’s going on in the world in our stories, partly because our characters will probably be thinking about current events and reacting to them. Mostly, though, because including specific details and big-picture events helps make the world of our story seem real to the reader.

In this book, Ernaux has gone further, focusing on the larger life of a society and placing the life of one woman within that.

. . . the idea had come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny” set between 1940 and 1986.

Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Time is the only narrative structure in this collage of private memories, public events, photos, songs, brand names, television, advertising, headlines. There’s no plot, no protagonist, no story question. Instead, we are given “abbreviated memories” spun together, some personal and some common.

It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.

I especially like the way Ernaux, looking back on a long life, refers to the past as a series of “palimpsests.” It’s an effective way to describe the veils that layer over each other as we try to recall how we were.

At first, I felt overwhelmed by the flow of historical events, popular culture, and experiences. I could barely grasp each fragment before it was replaced by another, perhaps because I was listening to the audio version, beautifully performed by Anna Bentinck. Eventually, though, I began to recognise how artfully they had been assembled to create a continuous narrative.

More importantly, I came to feel a part of the story, engrossed in the passing decades and fascinated by the ways my own life interacted with this collective story, merging and sliding apart, only to merge again and again slip away. I began to feel as though she were telling me the story of my own life, with occasional diversions.

Perhaps I should have first mentioned the unique point of view. Unlike most life writing, there is no “I” in the book. Instead—and fittingly for the story of a generation—it is narrated by “we,” as though by a chorus of voices. Apparently, in the original French version, the pronoun used is “on” which is the generic he/she that English is lacking, though it could be translated as “one.” The translator, Alison L. Strayer, has chosen instead to use “we,” which works brilliantly to capture the voice of the collective sections.

Some parts are about a specific woman, spoken of as “she.” As she nears the end of life, she begins to write this book to defy death’s erasure.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subjects that she has seen.

I plan to delve into other books by Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. I can see why this particular book was longlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Without getting into the controversy over whether it qualifies as fiction (a requirement for the Booker), I have to rank it high on my list of best books ever. To reach into my own past: it blew my mind.

Have you read a book by Annie Ernaux? What did you think about it?

Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle

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Memoirs come in many different forms. Some tell a chronological story, while others center around a theme. Some experiment with different structures. First published in 1972, this first in a series of memoirs by the author of A Wrinkle in Time and other beloved stories is more of a meditation, inviting us to explore with her, follow her thoughts, and see where they take us.

In the process, L’Engle gives us the kaleidoscope of her life at 51: spouse, parent, writer, teacher, choir director, member of communities large and small.

Many of her reflections are about writing in general, and specifically writing for children. She’s forthright about her years of rejections and how she felt about them. Invited to teach, she maintains that writing cannot be taught, but you can teach particular tools. Of course, she learns as much as she teaches, classroom discussions leading to new ideas.

She also defends children’s literature: its enduring appeal, its benefits for children and adults, and its literary quality.

L’Engle notes that “the concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.” In those moments, we are not conscious of ourselves, not self-conscious. She goes on to say: “Detachment and involvement: The artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

At one point she says that “An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students.” I think she means a moral responsibility, but it is still a concept that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

She speaks of her family’s years in New York City, and even more the years at Crosswicks, their rambling summer home in a small Connecticut town where at times four generations of her family live under one roof. There is much about community, and the peculiar interrelationship of people in such a small village, such as being suspicious of newcomers but still turning out to help them when they are in need.

Her portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s—the time period of this memoir—sometimes distracted me, sending my mind off into my own memories of those years. Hearing how someone the age of my parents viewed the happenings of that turbulent time sent me back to my own memories, turning them into new patterns.

She doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, such as faith, marriage, family, what might constitute a meaningful life. Still, it is her thoughts on writing that most resonate for me.

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

The title comes from her need to retreat sometimes to her “circle of quiet,” a particular place at Crosswicks. We all need such a place, one where we can be our true selves. If you want a rest from the trauma Olympics of many memoirs on the market, try these reflections from a writer whose work you may know very well.

Do you have a “circle of quiet,” a place that is peculiarly your own?

Best Books I Read in 2022

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

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Part memoir and part meditation, part travelogue and part dream journal: this book takes us into Smith’s world during the unsettling year 2016. Smith’s wanderings during that Chinese zodiac year certainly embody a monkey’s traits of cleverness, curiosity, and mischievousness.

The year starts for Smith with a series of concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theatre, followed by a surreal visit to Santa Cruz. From there she takes off on solitary wanderings to places like New York, Arizona, Kentucky, as well as to imagined and remembered places. She talks to strangers, meeting real and imagined people. She keeps vigil at the bedside of a beloved friend in a coma and visits another near the end of his life.

But more than her physical journeys, it’s what happens when she brings her particular mindset to grapple with the small irritations of life like the flood in her apartment, the larger problems in the country careering toward a showdown between democracy and what we then thought was populism in the November election, and most of all the death of friends and lovers, as well as the sense of her own time on earth running out as she approaches her 70th birthday.

It is art that holds her steady, whether studying the Ghent altarpiece or discussing Roberto Bolano’s work or a classic film. In one of my favorite parts she visits Fernando Pessoa’s house in Lisbon, and examines his personal library. He was a fascinating poet who wrote under his own name and 75 others, which he called heteronyms, creating full lives for each alternate personality.

In my classes on story structure, I’ve begun including a section on experimental structures. I tend to prefer more linear stories when I’m reading, but Jane Alison‘s book Meander, Spiral, Explode has helped me better appreciate other patterns and also to recognise them in stories that I’ve loved.

This memoir is definitely a meander, perhaps one of the hardest structures because it still has to hold together even as it wanders in a seemingly random fashion. Smith makes the challenge even greater by moving in and out of dreams and memory. As in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the margins are fluid. Smith moves deftly between the humorous, banal, or wrenching moments that make up her year, finds signs and portents in unexpected places, and stumbles upon strange happenings.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author. Her distinctive voice—the audible one—carried me even deeper into the experience than I believe her authorly voice alone would have. I mostly listened to it as I was falling asleep. Thus, with the membrane between sleep and waking so permeable, the surreal turns and dream logic seemed fitting.

I’d like to read it again and study more closely how she made it all work.

What book have you read recently that you immediately wanted to reread?