FESTIVAL DAYS by Jo Ann Beard

This book sat on my TBR pile for months. I loved Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, but Festival Days blew me away and rose to my favorite book status for 2022. Is it creative nonfiction with a mash-up of fiction thrown in the mix? In “Cheri,” about a terminally ill woman, how much is the subject's lived experience, especially when the reader is in the childhood brain of Cheri’s youth and then in Cheri’s head with her last thoughts before dying? In “Werner,” the reader feels the flames, smells the oily smoke, and worries over the desperation of trying to figure out how to escape a fire. It is a tension-filled story of a painter in NYC who survived a tenement fire in 1991 by leaping from his window into a window in the building next door. It’s riveting reading. How much is imagination? And how much was told to Beard by the subjects of her pieces (nine in all)? The themes in the collection, loss, illness, death, violence, and destruction make for heavy material—but Beard keeps it interesting with her focus on detailed sensory images. In an author’s note, she writes that some of the pieces in the collection were first published as stories. “They are also essays, in their own secret ways, and the essays are also stories.” In the end, I didn’t care. The writing is fierce and poetic. The material juggled masterfully by this artistic sage. I loved every word in this gorgeous book. FAVORITE BOOK OF 2022.  

Favorite line(s): He felt insubstantial and gossamer, like he was spun out of glass. Still stoned but not enough. Everything hurt, even his gums. It would take a long time for the pain to go away, longer than the ICU and the step-down unit, longer than the ward filled with grizzled men watching blaring televisions. Both the pain and the residual pain, which seemed structural in nature, a kind of raw, bludgeoning happiness that would afflict him for months, until he managed to separate from his feelings altogether. Also long-term tinnitus, from the blow to the top of the skull, an interior clanging that would never allow him, even for a moment, to confuse himself with the old Werner.

INTIMATIONS by Zadie Smith

Written during lockdown, Intimations examines the ways we all look at the reality of COVID. How do we get through the days? How do our relationships hold up or not? What time means to us. How work has changed the way we see ourselves and the world. How do we compare our suffering with others? What’s next? Smith asks and answers her own questions. These essays are conversational in tone. If this, then that. What ifs. And the writer’s bewilderment at the human condition.

Favorite line(s): For me, the cliché is true: only way out is through. Trying to preserve some “space for yourself” in the crowded domestic sphere feels like obsessively cupping your hands around thin air. You carve it out, the time you need, after much anxiety and debate, and get into the separate space and look between your hands, and there it is—nothing. An empty victory. At the end of April, in a powerful essay by another writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, I read this line about love: “Without it, life is just ‘doing time.’” I don’t think she intended by this only romantic love, or parental love, or familial love, or really any kind of love in particular. At least, I read it in the Platonic sense: Love with a capital L, an ideal form and essential part of the universe—like “beauty” or the color red—from which all particular examples on earth take their nature. Without this element present, in some form, somewhere in our lives, there really is only time, and there will always be too much of it. Busyness will not disguise its lack. Even if you’re working from home every moment God gives—even if you don’t have a minute to spare—still all of that time, without love, will feel empty and endless.

FOSTER by Claire Keegan

A young girl in rural Ireland is sent to live with childless relatives on a small farm hours away while her mother awaits the birth of another child. What she thinks of her parents' abandonment at the beginning of the novella turns into a summer she feels wanted and respected by her aunt and uncle. The aunt and uncle, she learns, lost a son in an accident. And while the narrator’s focus on her thoughts and feelings takes precedence throughout, we see her eventually learn to understand what it means to empathize with the grief of losing a child. She wishes her parents were more like her aunt and uncle. But the reader knows that isn’t possible. Keegan’s narrator is a master class in how to write from a child’s point of view.

Favorite line(s): I wonder why my father lies about the hay. He is given to lying about things that would be nice, it they were true. Somewhere, farther off, someone has started up a chainsaw and it drones on like a big, stinging wasp for a while in the distance. I wish I was out there, working, as I’m unused to sitting still and do not know what to do with y hands. Part of me wants my father to leave me here while another part of me wants him to take me back, to what I know. I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

THE HERO OF THIS BOOK by Elizabeth McCracken  

A novel? Or memoir? It’s sold as a novel but reads like a memoir. I’ve read a few books this year that cross over into reading like fiction when it’s creative nonfiction (Jo Ann Beard’s Festival Days) or just the opposite—a novel that reads like non-fiction. Am I perplexed? No. I love having authors dunk me in the deep recesses of their imagination not dependent on genre. Staying inside lanes has never been a prerequisite for appreciating a storyline. In The Hero of This Book, McCracken takes us to London on a solo trip to grieve her mother’s recent death. The mother, a quirky woman who would take a frozen chicken leg to work and toss it if alternate lunch plans came up. She thought sports were a waste of time and loved haggling in antique stores. McCracken illuminates the in-between. That area of mother-daughter relationships when the daughter realizes the mother is separate from her and secretive and slightly off center—even if it takes decades and death to bring it to the page. 

Favorite line(s): When I write, I think, That’s wrong, but I’ll get it right later on. Eventually I think, That’s wrong, but I’ll get it right in the next book. For everything wrong in this book, I apologize: I meant to fix it. I will fix it. We’re not our souls, we’re not our bodies; we’re the shimmering border between.