Gradually and then suddenly

A recent reading recap, a request, and why I will be MIA this fall

a fraction of the skipping stones we collected for my brother-in-law’s birthday gift

Hello my friends,

I’m returning to you after being entirely lost to the magic of life offline.

Summer, the briefest and slipperiest of seasons (to quote Ali Smith), came and went. First gradually and then suddenly (to quote Hemingway, about bankruptcy), we find ourselves in autumn.

Over here the leaves are starting to change. The nights are getting cooler. I climbed up into the attic last week to get my favorite, most cherished sweaters out from summer storage in anticipation. I can smell autumn in the air. Soon, we will be lighting the wood stove.

But let me not get ahead of myself.

This time of year, the bounty of the garden is still plentiful. On Friday, I picked what we estimate to be about 90 lbs of tomatoes and carried them up to our communal kitchen where my mother-in-law stayed up until 2 AM turning 50 lbs of them into her magical roasted sauce. Into the freezer each batch went, in the little space we have left after the frenzy of my recent cooking and freezing, and the whole chickens we raised and butchered this year. This week, I plan to pick a large cabbage to make a batch of kraut that will sit on the counter next to the fire cider, bubbling away in its brine until it is time to jar and eat. To this batch, I plan to add jalapeños and garlic to make my favorite kraut for grilled cheeses.

All this time in the kitchen makes me think of a recent poem that I heard, Refrigerator, 1957 by Thomas Lux. I will share it with you here. It’s a good one.

As is often the case, I read very little this summer and now I’m catching up with a ferocity that veers towards mania.

The one memorable book I did read this summer was Breaking & Entering by Joy Williams. My read, on a beach vacation in June, was so memorable, I wrote a whole newsletter about it and then never sent it because I was busy canoeing, planting, harvesting, or maybe hiking. Like I said earlier, I was lost to summer.

The newsletter was a summary of eating butter-drenched seafood in a tiny shack on the water and taking daily outdoor showers. Of finding tiny crabs in the bitter cold northern waters and tiny sea-glass all over the sand. There was one anecdote about our run to the ocean to catch the sunrise only to be greeted with the migration of thousands of dragonflies overhead. But largely, the newsletter feels stale and will continue to sit in drafts.

I will, however, recap some of what I wrote about Breaking & Entering. It was my first Joy Williams novel and it completely captivated me. Her character development is deep. The level of detail she goes into for tertiary characters and people met in passing is incredible. The dialogue is funny. The children are precocious. After following up the novel with several of her short stories, it seems like Williams and I may equally love an untidy ending.

Here is a snippet from Breaking & Entering that I read out loud to Jared before we walked down to the beach one day (for context, Clem is a dog):

Clem sat with his tail swept tightly around him so that it wouldn’t get stepped on. Two men and a woman sitting on nearby stools stared at him. The woman wore a white jumpsuit. From her earlobe hung the little hands of Barbie dolls, around her throat was a Ken head on a chain.

“I’m going to buy that dog a drink,’“ one of the men announced.

The other man snickered. “That year I was working in Corpus as an orderly,” he said. “I come out of the hospital one night, and in the parking lot was a dog like that lying besides a Trans Am and chewing on a human finger.”

“Dog like this one here?” the other man said.

He nodded. “Might have weighed a little less.”

The woman raised the Ken head and tapped it against her teeth. Ken’s mouth was set in a tiny smile. “A human finger,” she marveled. “Where would that have come from?”

“It could have come from anywheres,” the man from Corpus said.

The strangeness of the novel reminded me of a favorite short story, one that I’ve included in past workshops—Kingdom by Scott Broker, who has a novel forthcoming in 2026 that you can preorder now.

After Breaking & Entering, I read several duds, at least five, including a nearly 800-page book I will not name but that I’m amazed I powered through as it was boring from start to finish. And then, I read Rebecca.

Some years, I’ve set specific reading intentions or themes. For several years, I focused on reading more works in translation. This year, I set no specific intention besides slowing my reading way down after feverishly binging books for the last six years. I also set the non-reading specific intention of seeking out more joy (perhaps, I’m just now realizing, I meant Joy Williams). I’m thinking perhaps for 2026, I will plan to read more classics.

Rebecca was a delicious read. The pacing and prose were incredible. The twists and turns made it exciting. Upon finishing, I texted my friend Andrew pondering how it took me so long to read Rebecca and insisting they re-read it at once. I received a text several days later commenting on how incredible du Maurier is at crafting an unforgettable opening line… “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

I followed Rebecca up with The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer, a classic piece of autofiction that tells the story of an unnamed protagonist in the throes of a breakdown. Married to her third husband, the named and famous screenwriter Jake Armitage and mother to an unnumbered and unnamed (except Dinah) brood of children, I fell in love with the narrator’s at times cruel sense of humor and found the flashback scenes to be especially compelling subplots that reminded me of Alice Munro and Carson McCullers. I plan to watch the 1964 film adaptation this fall.

leaves kept falling in the open book as I read, another sign of autumn

This morning, I finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir All the Way to the River, lent to me by my dear friend Lauren, who saw Gilbert at a NJ stop on her book tour. I finished it sitting outside of a coffee shop wearing one of the previously mentioned unpacked sweaters. My initial take on the first half was that it was funny and smart and that Gilbert is eloquent and wise. I did the thing one of my dear friends does, a friend who I will not name but who will no doubt know I’m talking about them, and recommended it to several people before even getting halfway.

And then I hit a wall.

To be honest, this is a me issue and not an issue with the book. It’s particularly a me-with-memoirs (a genre I used to love and have come to feel largely lukewarm about) issue, even more specifically an issue with memoirs about people who have died. Memory is a fickle beast, and I find myself wondering how someone could remember and recount so much of a conversation that happened so long ago, and even more specifically, with someone who died and thus can’t be part of the fact checking process. However, in the last 100 pages of Gilbert’s memoir, I kept wondering did this conversation really happen? That is not for me to decide. Perhaps I am entirely missing the point. Perhaps I’m not meeting this book with the earnestness it deserves.

I felt this same way when I read Molly by Blake Butler. I think back on past relationships, even from the last decade, and my feelings and perspectives have shifted enough that I view these relationships in an entirely different light than I would have five years ago and perhaps will in another five years. With distance comes empathy and growth that shape the story but perhaps also skew it. I remember things differently and perhaps not as accurately. When too much of a recounted story is told in direct quotes, I start to wonder how accurate the quotes could be. It makes me think of the essay my friend Rich wrote during our MFA on the said and unsaid, the quoted and the summarized. I find that memoirs that summarize the feelings of the moment, or the sentiments shared, rather than the exact words a person said, land best with me, the forever skeptic, a trait I do not love about myself. And yet here we are.

This was compounded by another non-fiction pet peeve of mine, which is writers telling readers how they should perceive a situation (i.e., telling vs showing—perhaps more useful in fiction but still present in nonfiction). I found myself struggling with the last third of this book with all the “now listen”s and “you have to understand”s, and yet I finished it and I am glad I did because I do genuinely enjoy Gilbert’s introspection, specifically on addiction, and think that she is a good writer.

I immediately picked up Miriam Towes’ memoir A Truce That is Not Peace which I will not recommend just yet, having only read 90 pages. I will report that most of the dialogue is a summary. This bodes well.

After that, well who knows what I will read next. I certainly have plenty to choose from piling up on my nightstand and on my bookshelf. I am most excited about Makenna Goodman’s new release Helen of Nowhere, blurbed by Rachel Cusk, Sarah Manguso, and Samantha Hunt. I have a collection of Joy William’s short stories. A copy of The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector. I finally got my hands on The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All by the poet C.D. Wright and E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat, both recommended by Lindsey Glass, who I miss seeing on the internet. When those are done I could read one of the many unread novels lining my bookshelf. Or I could take the plunge and complete the order that’s been sitting in a cart online that currently includes Tove Jansson’s Sun City, Katharine Butler Hathaway’s The Little Locksmith, and the much-talked-about On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle.

As much as I have goals of reading all of these and more, I’m not sure how much reading I will be doing this fall. Something I’ve not shared with you yet as I was not telling people when I last wrote you, is that I am due to give birth to a baby any day now. While I like to think that I will be able to continue to devour books in between late night feedings, early morning feedings, and mid day feedings, perhaps I have a romantic and unrealistic idea of parenthood and of myself, seeing as I have not stopped moving or doing in the last 9 months. However trapped in this liminal space between pregnancy and parenthood, I will keep reading books back to back to pass the unknown hours/days/weeks.

a much smaller belly from a 6 AM canoe trip in July

If I could make a small request of you, my friend and reader, I would love more book recommendations, as well as audiobooks, movies, and TV shows to keep me/us company during our planned hibernation this fall/winter. The more the better. Send them all my way in the comments, in an email, in a postcard. I will be here waiting.

Sadly, this exciting arrival means that I will not be teaching any writing classes for the remainder of this year, but perhaps I will be back with you in the spring.

Only time will tell.

Until then,
CM