The bittersweet arrival of fall
Plus five new memoirs you probably haven't heard of. Plus Alice Elliott Dark!
I think a lot of us feel melancholy when fall arrives—I’m one of them. But this is a feeling that always surprises me, because I love fall. And beyond that, since my 40s, I’ve joked that I have reverse seasonal affective disorder: Summer’s heat and humidity leave me cranky, prone to migraines, and obsessed with trying to keep our mostly non-air-conditioned house cool. I spend too many summer days just sorting out how to get through the heat. But even so, the approach of autumn—shorter days, end of my vegetable harvest, end of swimming season—all make me wish I could stop time, and enjoy another few weeks of beautiful tomatoes, just-turning-pink hydrangeas, a swim in clear lake water… Maybe these feelings grow stronger as we pass through midlife and the metaphor is that much harder to ignore.
Still, this time of year is especially beautiful in New Hampshire, and here are a couple of views from our farm.
Five new memoirs you probably haven’t heard of
Celebrity memoirs get all the attention, so I wanted to shine a light on a few other (non-celeb) memoirs. These five very different writers tell compelling, sometimes harrowing, sometimes funny stories. And they all have something to say about women’s lives right now.
Life on Other Planets, Aomawa Shields. One of the few women (and even fewer black women) astrobiologists, Shields tells the story of her journey to astrophysics and astrobiology, a journey that began with a freezing-cold night of stargrazing in high school. The memoir also describes her longtime pull towards the arts and acting, and how she brought these two disparate interests together in her life and work. I reviewed Life on Other Planets for July BookPage.
Holler Rat, Anya Liftig. Performance artist Liftig grew up in two very different worlds: her mother’s underprivileged home of Ganderbill Holler, KY, and her father’s privileged, upper-middle-class Jewish home in Connecticut. Her story of finding art, breaking down, and making her way.
Exit Interview, Kristi Coulter. Coulter details her decade working in the belly of the beast, AKA a high-level executive for Amazon. It’s an experience that’s worse than you might imagine, yet Coulter is a funny, smart, entertaining guide. I reviewed Exit Interview for September BookPage.
The Rye Bread Marriage, Michaele Weissman. The voicey, often funny memoir about a marriage of opposites; the subtitle is “How I Found Happiness with a Partner I’ll Never Understand.” I reviewed this one for August BookPage.
Necessary Trouble, Drew Gilpin Faust. Former president of Harvard University Faust offers her own coming-of-age story, growing up in a privileged white family in 1950s rural Virginia, breaking away from rigidly traditional expectations (“You broke your mother’s heart,” a family friend says to her, at her mother’s funeral, when she’s only 19), and finding a place in the civil rights movement and in academia. Faust is a historian, and she includes lots of cultural history for context.
For writers: Alice Elliott Dark and the shadow book
I’m a big fan of the novelist Alice Elliott Dark, as I’ve probably mentioned before. Her recent novel Fellowship Point was one of my favorites of 2022. It’s a big, nineteenth-centuryish novel about the friendship of two women in their early 80s, Agnes and Polly. Fellowship Point is about a lot more than that, but it’s one of those novels that’s hard to describe, and it’s also one that my agent calls “quiet” (which is supposedly the opposite of what publishers are looking for).
I first learned about Dark’s work when I read her beautiful short story “In the Gloaming” many years ago. It’s a spare story about a mother and young-adult son—the son, who’s dying of AIDS, has come home, and they’re figuring out how to live together during his last days. It first ran in The New Yorker, and then in Dark’s story collection In the Gloaming. (I was happy to see that In the Gloaming was re-released as an ebook last year.)
Dark has been writing fiction for decades—she published two story collections and one novel before Fellowship Point, her breakout novel. She was also in her late 60s when she published the bestselling Fellowship Point; make of that what you will, but it’s a trajectory that gives me hope as a late-blooming fiction writer.
I also love her Substack newsletter "Alice on Sunday,” a newsletter about the writing process and teaching writing. Here’s what she said about the shadow book, which I imagine many writers can relate to:
“The shadow book is a place to jump to if the main project stalls. It is also a dreamy place that may for quite a while retain that sense of wholeness and clarity that the work that is front and center has foregone for the sake of mucking around in the weeds. I pick up the shadow book every so often and add a paragraph or make note of an idea, but it is still a vision rather than a project. It is also the carrot set out in front of my nose (they used to do this to urge tired horses to take another step forward, in case you don’t know) to get through this book so I can make that one the project.”
For more Alice Elliott Dark, and the process of writing Fellowship Point, listen to this wonderful interview with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft podcast.
Watching: Love at First Sight
Rom-coms are outside my usual wheelhouse, but a couple of friends recommended this one. And now I recommend it too—Love at First Sight, adapted from the YA novel The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith, is the story of Hadley (Haley Lou Richardson) and Oliver (Ben Hardy), two young people who meet on a flight to London in December, fall for each other, and get separated.
Adding depth are the movie’s background stories: Hadley’s dad (Rob Delaney) is getting remarried to a woman that Hadley’s never met, and Oliver’s mother (Sally Phillips) is dying of lung cancer. Jameela Jamil serves as wry, mildly comic narrator, popping up throughout the film in various tiny roles. Love at First Sight is a bittersweet, fable-ish love story with a candy-colored look, a one-day structure, offbeat London settings, and what might be a perfect soundtrack. And it gives some gentle Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually vibes. I only wish the movie had offered some comic moments to the great Sally Phillips (amazing as Finnish Prime Minister Minna Haakinen on Veep) and Rob Delaney (creator/actor on the comically genius anti-romcom Catastrophe).*
*For anyone who needs a little dose of Minna on Veep or Rob on Catastrophe, here they are, below:
Until next time! Please let me know what you’re reading, watching, and writing!
Beautiful pics and thanks for the memoir recs! I watched Love at First Sight and thought it was great.
The farm is stunning 😮. So glad to learn about these books.