narrative nonfiction

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?

Best Books I Read in 2024

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are ten of the best books I read in 2024. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Note: I did not include poetry here, though I read the work of some amazing poets, such as Richard Wilbur, Sam Schmidt, Linda Pastan, Ellen Bryant Voight, and Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re interested in reading a wider range of poets, consider joining in on the monthly Poetry Discussion Group I host. Free, no experience necessary, and copies of the poems are provided. Details on my website.

Fiction

  1. Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become. Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. A powerful story that puts our current social and political tensions into a (so far) fictional authoritarian world.

  1. The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. When Nell gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library, she embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. The delightfully complicated plot uses maps in surprising and satisfying ways.

  1. The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

This fascinating novel is based on the true story of twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo who in 1865 leads a group of her fellow former slaves to build a community in the Carolinas. The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

  1. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her remaining child, Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. In this complex story, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. It is a cracking good read, and accurate in its depiction of the time and place, at least according to my memories.

  1. The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

Chieko lives with her parents in the same building that houses their shop in Kyoto. This gentle story of a few months in her life begins with three images that embody themes central to Japanese literary tradition while later, more modern themes emerge. The microcosm of Chieko and her family holds a much larger story about how we handle the past—what we keep and what we discard—not only traditions but also our memories and our own identities.  This beautifully written story is one that will haunt me.

Nonfiction

  1. Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. As MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders of the natural world, she encourages us to see nature as something other than a reflection of ourselves. I read and reread these essays, loving the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world.”

  1. Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty. For a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

  1. Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

This astonishing book should be required reading everywhere in the Western world. This history of women in England for the last 900 years is fascinating and infuriating. Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. In this book, every assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically. As the book progresses through the centuries, we get stories of many extraordinary women and their struggles.

  1. The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, created in 1960 to provide a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. The book provides fascinating insight into the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

  1. Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

 

What are the best books you read in 2024?

The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

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Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of a “messy experiment” at Radcliffe College. President Mary Ingraham Bunting became concerned with what happened to the graduates of this all-women college. Since at that time women were expected to marry and spend their time caring for their husbands and family, these educated women were expected to give up their academic or creative pursuits, or reduce them to hobbies, in order to become what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house.”

Remembering her own career as a microbiologist–and now college president–while raising a family, Bunting created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960. Fellowships provided a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. For a two-year period, the Institute would provide a fellow the prerequisites for creative work, as described by Woolf in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own.”

Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. They called themselves The Equivalents per the Institute’s requirement “that applicants have either a doctorate or ‘the equivalent’ in creative achievement.” Her extensive research underlies this engaging story of five very different women and their creative journeys. And the book is so much more: a cultural history of the time, an in-depth look at creativity—what enhances it and what destroys it—and an examination of privilege.

I confess that it is the latter that most interests me because, after all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, while White women in droves were immersing themselves in being housewives, Black and working class women were already working while trying to raise a family. I appreciate that in covering the nascent second wave of feminism, Doherty includes the Black women’s movement. While acknowledging it isn’t “her” experience, she does examine the very real problems Black women had with what became the  mostly middle- and upper-class White women’s movement.

Tillie Olsen’s story provides a needed corrective to Sexton’s upper-class privilege and that of the others’ somewhat lesser privilege. Olsen was “a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator” who said outright that “the true struggle was the class struggle.” After early publication and literary acclaim, she had been side-tracked by the overwhelming labor of house, family, and dead-end job. Eventually the author of the best-seller Silences, she was alert to all the things that keep us from creating.

The way Doherty sensitively examines these women’s different struggles and achievements lifts this narrative above the ghoulish interest in Sexton’s suicide attempts and the tendency to concentrate on those artists who have been anointed as important—almost exclusively White males at the time, or the handful of women championed by them—to look at a broad range of circumstances and personalities.

She acknowledges the privilege but goes deeper. As Olsen said, “There’s nothing wrong with privilege except that not everybody has it.” This is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Fellowships, grants, prizes are wonderful but not everyone has the resources—time and money—to pursue and take advantage of them. As a single parent working two and sometimes three jobs to support my family, my own writing career had to be mostly put on hold for years.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

Do you have a room of your own?

The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown

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Most people are familiar with this story of the rowing team from the University of Washington that won the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. A good example of narrative nonfiction, it is a well-researched, factual account that is eminently readable.

All the basic elements of good prose are here: the clarity of well-constructed sentences, good pacing through varying sentence structure, consistency achieved by presenting information in a logical sequence that the reader can easily follow. Beyond these, I want to point out a few methods that Brown employed to make it so absorbing a read.

One is that he centers the book on one character: Joe Rantz, a student from a working class background, left to fend for himself at a young age after his remaining parent abandoned him in the small town of Sequim, Washington. Recruited by rowing coach Alvin Ulbrickson, he attended the University of Washington; however, for him to aspire to a coveted spot on the rowing team meant competing against the privileged young men from expensive prep schools who embodied the elite image of rowing.

With a main character to root for as he confronts the physical challenges of competitive rowing and the psychological challenges of the U.S. class system, Brown begins to introduce other people of interest. One at a time—giving us a chance to get to know them before moving on—he gives us Ulbrickson, the head coach; Robert Mox, coxswain; Donald Hume, stroke; and freshman coach Tom Bolles.

Another way Brown makes the story so compelling is through making the Olympic race the climactic moment near the end of the book. Even though most readers know the outcome before starting the book, the suspense of waiting to see how it happens is immense. The suspense is fed by all the minor trials and setbacks, all the races against Washington’s main rival, California, and the Ivy League founders of the Rowing League, Columbia, Cornell, and Pennsylvania. Adding to the tension is the fact that the story takes place during the depths of the Great Depression.

These details are proof of the extensive research the author completed. The details that Brown chooses to include—the tip of the iceberg—serve the story by giving the reader a fuller picture of the time and the character’s motivations. In particular, the details about the construction of the shells are presented in context and in such a way as to fascinate any reader.

Three themes of the book adds to its hold the reader. One is the portrait of poverty at the time (though it’s certainly as bad as today in some areas). Joe’s struggle to get by as an abandoned teenager, as well as his and some of his teammates’ difficulty in coming up with the necessary funds, give the reader a better appreciation of the effects of the Depression.

A second theme is the difference between today and life in 1930s. Beyond economics, there is the relative isolation, with only radio and newspapers as media. The physical isolation comes through in the description of the trip to the East Coast to compete in the League championship. It is Joe’s first train trip and his first view of other parts of the country.

The final theme I want to point out is the context of the 1936 Olympics itself: Hitler’s Germany. The Berlin Olympics served Hitler’s goal of presenting Nazi Germany as a superior nation. Beyond hiding evidence of the Nazi’s abuses, the image of Berlin was meticulously orchestrated by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl as propaganda to prove to the world Aryan “purity” and Nazi supremacy. However familiar we may already be with this context, the details and the engaging way they are presented give us a deeper understanding of this early foray in marketing an image and a precursor of the horror to come. They also add further pressure to the U.S. team in the climactic race, as they strive to overcome the handicaps imposed by the Nazi organisers and beat their German rivals.

Narrative nonfiction occupies a particularly fertile middle ground between fiction and nonfiction. And it’s even more challenging for an author who must undertake the necessary research and abide by the limitations of accuracy imposed by nonfiction, while also employing the tools of a fiction writer. Brown ably demonstrates proficiency in all of these areas. This book deserves its accolades.

If you’ve read this popular book, what was your main takeaway?