THIS IS THE NIGHT OUR HOUSE WILL CATCH FIRE: A MEMOIR by Nick Flynn

When Flynn was a child growing up in Massachusetts, his mother tried to burn the house down with him and his brother in it. Now, as an adult, Flynn, with a young daughter and a marriage in crisis, tries, metaphorically, and without understanding, to burn his own life down. This unraveling and subsequent reflection is Flynn’s honest depiction of how we take childhood trauma and press it, like a Silly-Puddy imprint, onto our adult selves. The short chapters look at these collective memories and present-day struggles like a dance of push-pull, with honest and beautiful prose.  

Favorite line(s): I grew up surrounded by many people I could not trust. Damaged, beautiful people. I learned how to survive within those parameters. Years later, like most of us, I was drawn to those who were familiar—those with whom I’d need to remain somewhat guarded. Those who were possibly even a threat, if I let my guard down. So I never let my guard down. This, unfortunately, was also true for my marriage.

ARCHIPELAGO by Natalie Bakopoulos

I went down a Bakopoulos Greek fiction escape while visiting Athens and Crete this fall. In Archipelago, the author’s most recent novel, the unnamed middle-aged narrator is in the throes of change. The physical, mental, and spiritual vistas of accepting what lies beyond how she’s seen and perceived in the world. Not fearful of her unmooring, the narrator is excited “to become another self in another reality, cast out. To tell another story.” 

Favorite line(s): The ancient world of the sea and where it meets the land. The sea as the site were all the world’s crises converge. Humans have destroyed so much, yet the olive groves partitioned off by the ancient Greek settlers, on that island where I wandered with Luka, remained intact. I told Luka about my father’s town, the family olive grove that they had sold, and that years later had probably been charred by wildfire. I have always been fascinated by olive trees, the adaptability of their roots. Every old olive tree is a composite—a root and its branch, a root and its branch, a root and its branch. A system.

SCORPIONFISH by Natalie Bakopoulos

Mira returns to her childhood home in Athens after the death of her parents. She develops a deep friendship with her neighbor, a sea captain, who has landed without a boat to navigate. The two talk freely about their families, careers, and love. Mira is coming off a relationship with a rising Greek politician, and a friend is caring for a young refugee. It is a story of possibility. Of their collective love for Athens—with its history and hypocrisies.

Favorite line(s): It is impossible to piece together where something went wrong when all we have are memories, and memories of memories. You could take them all and line them up, each moment, but it would never add up to a life. What makes a life is the white space, the glue that holds everything together. It is impossible to know, impossible to understand. I had thought everything lay in the unsaid.

WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy  (audio)

How do we protect our loved ones living in an uncertain world of climate change? With acts of self-sacrifice. The Salt family, the father, a daughter, and two sons, are protecting a seed bank and lighthouse on the fictional Shearwater Island, located in the subantarctic between Tasmania and Antarctica. The seeds are preserved in the event of global destruction and the need to replant food for survivors. The family moves around the island with the ghost of the children’s mother, who died giving birth to the youngest son. And then a woman shipwrecks and washes up ashore on Shearwater. Who is she and what does she want? This sets up the thriller-esque storyline, along with rising water and faulty electrical and communication equipment. Moody and full of plot twists, Wild Dark Shore feels dangerous in all the right ways.

WRECK by Catherine Newman (audio)

Catherine Newman’s work reads like thought bubbles above your best friend’s head. Rocky, the narrator in Wreck, is long married, middle-aged, and caring for her ninety-plus-year-old father. Her son is off living his life in NYC, while her college-aged daughter has moved back in to apply to grad school. Rocky goes down the WebMD rabbit hole almost every night after developing a rash all over her body. An insomniac, she then finds an obituary of a classmate of her son’s who was killed in a collision with a train. She’s a “wreck” for most of the novel, going from one medical appointment to another, researching the consulting firm that advised the railroad to cut maintenance to save money. All along, she makes fun of herself and the absurdities of life, even when the news is not so hilarious. Newman’s Wreck reads as a standalone novel, but put side by side with Sandwich, you’ve got a full, full domestic life. 

WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL by Sue Monk Kidd

Like the author, I started writing fiction late in life after a career in journalism. So many of Kidd’s experiences in how she came to writing are familiar. The lack of mentorship. The idea that the soul does not want to be saved but to bear witness and heard by the world (aka readers). That to write is not an idea but a way of life. And that “longing is one of the most eloquent and insistent ways the soul speaks.” And I would add, without longing, you have nothing to write about. This memoir on writing speaks to the under the under of the process. The swirling elements, mysterious even to the writer, that circulate in the blood before the pen hits the page.

Favorite line(s): When I write in the midst of pain and loss, I’m sometimes presented with healing images from my unconscious. “When the Soul wants to experience something, she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it,” wrote Meister Eckhart. This is especially true when we’re writing. If we hold on to the image and keep it alive in our mind, it seems to function a little like a transducer a device that converts energy from one form ito another. An image can have the effect of turning fear, grief, confusion, or futility toward their opposites.