Mariella Hunt

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  • The Rain Watcher: When Nature Gets Angry

    The Rain Watcher: When Nature Gets Angry


    The Rain Watcher by Tatiana de Rosnay: A Novel About Family, Floods, and the Wrath of Nature

    A Note on Trees

    I want to begin this review of The Rain Watcher by Tatiana de Rosnay with a comment: trees are far cleverer than we give them credit for. Under the right conditions, they can live for hundreds of years, making some of them older than our major cities. In de Rosnay’s novel, we meet a character who understands the personality of trees. He loves them so much that he comes to be known as Treeman.

    I would have been interested to learn more about him, but when Paul Malegarde suffers a horrific stroke, there is little opportunity for him to communicate at all. We know him mostly through flashbacks of his childhood. Though I enjoyed The Rain Watcher, I believe the novel missed an opportunity to do more with this fascinating character.

    As a whole, The Rain Watcher felt like something else: a family novel in which the subject of trees sometimes seems tacked onto the larger story.

    Reunion Under Water: The Plot of The Rain Watcher

    The Malegarde family has agreed to meet in Paris after spending some time apart. Paul, the aforementioned Treeman, Lauren, Linden, and Tilia are gathering to celebrate Paul’s seventieth birthday. Because of the differences within the family, such a reunion was always going to be risky.

    But Paris decides to make things even more complicated.

    Heavy rain causes catastrophic flooding across the city, creating an almost apocalyptic backdrop for the family’s reunion. During his birthday dinner, Paul is giving a speech when he suffers a horrific stroke and is rushed to the hospital. But during a flood of this magnitude, even the hospital is not guaranteed to be a safe place. The water spares very little of Paris, and the levels continue to rise.

    Linden has never had a warm relationship with his father. After discovering in school that he was gay, he did everything he could to put space between himself and Paul. He does not know how his father will see him if he tells the truth. He has reason to doubt: his mother already reacted poorly when he came out to her.

    A chasm has therefore long existed between Linden and his father, one that he is forced to cross following Paul’s stroke, as Linden becomes the one who goes to keep his father company at the hospital.

    However, more powerful than all of this emotional noise is the flood.

    Perhaps de Rosnay did this deliberately. Nature and its merciless wrath dominate everything the characters believe is important.

    All that we live and fight for is nothing in the face of the flood.

    The Wrath of the River

    There is a flashback scene in which Linden, as a child, goes with his father on an excursion up Lance Mountain:

    The splendor of the image remained imprinted in his mind. His father finally spoke. He said it all seemed calm, so peaceful, didn’t it? Linden nodded. His father then said something he never forgot. When nature got angry, Paul said, there was nothing man could do about it. Nothing at all.

    The mood underlying The Rain Watcher is bleak. Readers are repeatedly reminded that, in disasters like this, our notion of time means very little.

    A tree is outwardly quiet and simple, but it may have seen more years than we could imagine. Floodwater can quickly destroy things that humans spent centuries building with their hands.

    With all our clever inventions, we are not, and never have been, entirely in control. If humanity were suddenly to vanish, a tree with steadier roots would fare better than any house we ever built.

    “A tree is just as much alive as they were,” Paul told his little boy, lifting him up so he could also touch the rugged, coarse surface. “A tree must fight for survival,” his father told him, “and it must do this every single second.”

    Linden is forced to take on the role of head of the family when his mother becomes sick with the flu, almost at the same time as her husband’s stroke. Linden has always had the sense that he needed to prove himself to his father. Now Paul is seriously ill and Lauren is sick.

    Linden is forced, unwillingly, into the role of leading his family through a storm, both literal and figurative.

    What the Rain Hides

    The Rain Watcher hinges on the whims of nature. During a storm, it can seem as though there is not a whole lot going on, but de Rosnay reminds us that while a storm might stop traffic, a thousand other things are happening: hellos and goodbyes are being said, dreams are being achieved, and dreams are being forsaken.

    Life and nature move at their own speeds. It is futile to try to be in control.

    Linden tells his father all the things he has kept inside. His father has no way of responding. Time moves at its own pace.

    But Paul has one final thing to tell his son.

    He communicates through a specialist assigned by the hospital to stroke patients, who writes down instructions Paul gives to Linden. These instructions lead Linden to his family home, where he is supposed to look inside an old tree.

    There, inside a tin box, he finds a confession concerning an event that took place when Paul was a child and left a wound in him that never healed.

    A truth for a truth.

    I understand what de Rosnay was trying to do with this part of the novel, but it seemed a bit forced to me. Told in interludes, Paul’s confession sometimes seemed to distract from rather than deepen the central story.

    The tree material works best when it illuminates The Rain Watcher’s larger meditation on time, mortality, and humanity’s smallness in the face of nature. When it becomes another piece of family history to be uncovered, it feels considerably less organic.

    In spite of these flaws, I did enjoy The Rain Watcher, and Linden is one of my favorite characters that I have “met” this year.

    An apocalypse doesn’t always involve a sinister pace. Far less predictable, and more unsettling, is the rain.

  • A Death in the Family by James Agee: A Reflection on Grief and Loss

    A Death in the Family by James Agee: A Reflection on Grief and Loss


    I should have known, by the novel’s title, that A Death in the Family was going to be heavy. The fact that its author, James Agee, is also dead, and that he died young, makes the novel especially haunting and poignant. I have no way of reaching out to Agee or asking him about the book; I can only come to know him through the words he left behind. And, after all, this is enough. A novelist, ultimately, wants to be known for their novels.

    James Agee and A Death in the Family

    An American novelist, journalist, and poet, James Agee was born in 1909 and died of a heart attack in 1955, at the age of 45. A Death in the Family was published posthumously in 1957, two years after his death, which adds something special to his words. One must wonder if he ever had a premonition of his own early demise; indeed, it would not be the first novel by a deceased person that has made me wonder about this.

    Agee’s writing has the unique quality of seeing beauty in everyday things, including childhood, grief, and poverty. His descriptions seem long-winded at times, but it is worth working through them, peeling back the layers of emotion that make a novel memorable.

    The novel begins when the protagonist, Jay, receives a phone call saying that his father is sick. He must go at once to visit his family and find out what has happened. On the way home, he is driving too fast and suffers a car accident that kills him instantly. The twenty chapters that follow trace a family as it navigates the first hours of grief, particularly Jay’s children, his son Rufus.

    Grief and the People We Leave Behind

    You couldn’t like anyone more than you happened to like them; you simply couldn’t. And you couldn’t feel more about them than that amount of liking made possible to you.

    The thought crosses the mind of Jay’s wife as she waits for word about her father-in-law. It made me reflect on how, after the death of a person, everyone is compelled to think kindly of them. It seems like sacrilege to ponder their flaws or mistakes.

    But in many instances, the kind thoughts exchanged after a death are dishonest, meant to soothe the conscience of the speaker. Death changes the way we remember people. Once someone is gone, we can no longer argue with them, forgive them, resent them, or ask them to explain themselves. We are left alone with our memories, and those memories can be both tender and complicated.

    Rufus reflects, after his own father’s death:

    He was glad his father didn’t know [about his mistake] because if his father knew he would think even worse of him than ever. But if his father’s soul was around, always, watching over them, then he knew. And that was worst of anything because there was no way to hide from a soul, and no way to talk to it, either.

    This is one of the things Agee understands so well about grief: losing someone does not mean our relationship with them simply ends. We continue to think about what they knew, what they thought of us, what we wish we had said, and what we would say if we could speak to them again.

    How Do You Explain Death to a Child?

    How does one explain death to a child?

    My heart ached to read the chapters where the adults attempted to make Rufus and his little sister, Catherine, understand that their father was never coming home. How do you explain to a young mind the magnitude of the changes that are going to rattle their world? How do you explain the idea of grief?

    Their mother tells them about the wake:

    But when we see Daddy today, children, his soul won’t be there. It’ll just be Daddy’s body. Very much as you’ve always seen him. But because his soul has been taken away, he will be lying down, and he will lie very still. It will be just as if he were asleep, so you must both be just as quiet as if he were asleep and you didn’t want to wake him. Quieter.

    “But I do,” said Catherine.

    But I do, said the young girl.

    Unmoved by her mother’s religious explanation, she sees no reason why it would be wrong to try to wake the dead. Her words are not dressed and proper like those of the adults. They are honest, as only a child can be, and I find myself agreeing with her.

    Religion did not soften my grief: I wanted only to wake the one who was sleeping and bring her back to the land of the living.

    There is something devastatingly simple about Catherine’s response. She doesn’t understand why the adults have accepted something she cannot accept. Her father is asleep. Why shouldn’t she wake him?

    Perhaps that is what makes childhood grief so painful to read. Children have not yet learned all the complicated language adults use around death. They simply know that someone they love is gone and that they want them back.

    Reading A Death in the Family While Living With Grief

    Books that involve grief and death hit me differently, as both are constantly on my mind. I dwell on them more than is perhaps healthy; reading this novel, so focused on these same matters and lamentations, reassured me that my mind is not the only one to have ruminated on them.

    James Agee wrote a long novel exploring loss from every possible angle. He examined death through the eyes of a bereaved spouse, a grieving brother, and a confused child. My fixation may not be healthy, but I have never been alone in it.

    Perhaps I will never write a novel quite this bleak. But I hope that my own writing might always be this honest.

    I am more afraid of my loved ones dying than of dying myself. I have experienced that great absence, and I live with the dread that one day it will return. Books like this remind me that I am not the first person to live with such fears. I do not want to think about death all the time, but I cannot pretend that I am unusual for thinking about it.

    Death is the great mystery that human beings have contemplated from the beginning of time.

    A Death in the Family is a masterful study of that mystery.

  • After Anne: L.M. Montgomery’s Other Love Story

    After Anne: L.M. Montgomery’s Other Love Story


    A couple of days ago, I shared my interview with Logan Steiner, author of After Anne. Her novel is a fictionalized imagining of the life of L. M. Montgomery, the Canadian author best known for Anne of Green Gables and the unforgettable Anne Shirley.

    After Anne reveals a truth about Montgomery that is not often considered: she spent much of her life struggling with depression, even during the years in which she was writing about the charismatic and dreamy Anne Shirley.

    Reading Steiner’s account of Maud’s struggle, it’s clear that her troubles become worse when she meets and grows to like Ewan MacGregor, the minister she will eventually marry. Ewan is not a simple villain, but he is portrayed as displaying several qualities and behaviors that we would today call red flags.

    For a woman living in Maud’s time, however, the choices surrounding marriage were different. Women were expected to become wives and start families. Enough of a dreamer still lived in Maud that she hoped there would at least be feelings involved in the matter.

    Steiner gives us a telling glimpse of Maud’s understanding of marriage:

    “Ever since she’d first had real feelings for a man, Maud had suspected that marriage could be heaven with a man she loved, and hell with one she did not.”

    Indeed, Maud repeatedly demonstrates that her heart prioritizes writing over Ewan, even after their wedding. And when I asked Steiner about this in our interview, she agreed:

    “I do think Maud had a deeper love story with writing than she did with Ewan. Writing was her refuge. When those stories competed, writing inevitably came out on top, to Ewan’s dismay. That is not to say that marriage and creativity need to compete. But Maud’s story shows how difficult a creative path can be when paired with an insecure partner.”

    Dreams That Won’t Settle

    I thought it important to begin my review of After Anne with this point because the novel is not simply a story about a woman who wrote books.

    After Anne is the story of a woman who does not want to choose between love and creativity, but is being pressured to all the same. It is the story of what happens when the thing that gives a woman life becomes a source of discomfort to the person closest to her.

    In The Artist and the Feast, which I reviewed yesterday, I found a similar theme. There is a dynamic between Essie and her uncle Tata in which he cannot bear to see his niece make progress in the arts. It makes him insecure, and as a result, he does things that are evil—destroying her work and saying cruel things meant to tear her down.

    When a person you live with is threatened by what you love, it can lead to a specific form of danger. Ewan MacGregor never does these things to Maud, but Steiner makes it clear that he is unhappy with many of her choices.

    Ewan’s behavior is sometimes erratic, and Maud cannot ignore what remains unsaid between them. Speaking to her cousin Frede about Ewan, Maud finds herself forced to make a confession. When Frede asks:

    “But Maud—you do like Ewan, don’t you?”

    Maud admits:

    “I do like Ewan…. But there’s a strange feeling I get sometimes around him. When I talk, you would think I was the most interesting person in the world…. But those looks also turn my stomach sometimes…. When I look in his eyes, it can be like looking in a dark tunnel….”

    Maud finishes:

    “Sometimes I am not so sure his long stares are about me. It is like there is a cloth covering half his face that I cannot pull aside.”

    “Womanly” Ambitions

    Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Canada in 1874. After her mother died when she was very young, she was raised largely by her grandparents on Prince Edward Island, the landscape that would eventually become the setting for her beloved novels. She worked as a teacher and librarian while publishing stories and poems.

    Anne of Green Gables, her breakthrough novel, was published in 1908, and she went on to write more than twenty novels. One would not have guessed from the beauty of her prose that she struggled with loneliness and despair. She died in 1942 in what has long been understood as suicide. Her journals, though edited by Montgomery herself, remain an important record of her life.

    I thought that Steiner’s portrayal of Montgomery in After Anne was excellent. She reminded me of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. Both of these remarkable women wrote stories about romance, but a dashing husband was never the only thing they seemed to want from life. Their books suggest a deep investment in story, imagination, and the life of the mind.

    I have asked myself in the past: Did Austen and Alcott know that, once married, they would have virtually no time to write?

    In After Anne, Maud finds herself rereading a letter that she wrote to Frede twelve years prior. It is a grim letter, not excited about moving forward and starting a new future. Instead, she grieves what would be lost, such as the home that she shares with her grandmother, after marriage.

    Then comes a passage very much in the vein of Alcott:

    “But Maud might also be an old maid with books for children and a pen for a husband. She would not be unhappy if so, she’d written, because what she’d put into life mattered more than what she got out of it.”

    What’s more, it becomes evident early in their courtship that any success on Maud’s part will be uncomfortable for Ewan. In a conversation with Frede, Ewan asks about her ambition to be a professor. He smiles and says, “You’ve never spoken about [these ambitions] before.”

    Frede looks him in the eye and says:

    “Consider whether you would have asked [about them], had I been a man.”

    I asked Steiner about this exchange, to which she replied:

    “Frede put plainly what I thought many readers would feel—that societal pressures on women can run counter to living a full life. Maud and Frede’s relationship reminded me of friends in my life whose honesty and openness puts me at ease. I love being around people who say the thing without worrying constantly how someone else will hear the thing. That was Frede to Maud.”

    This passage is uncomfortable, indeed. Ewan asks Frede:

    “Am I to take it, then, that you don’t have any womanly ambitions?”

    He adds hastily:

    “I only mean—do you want a husband eventually? Or children?”

    Frede gives him a firm, unflinching answer: no. Then Ewan turns to Maud and poses the same question. She wonders how the spotlight turned to her so abruptly, and she also realizes what “womanly” meant to Ewan.

    Ewan considered “womanly” ambitions to mean a husband and children, of course. Not writing.

    But on page 194, Maud confesses:

    “Writing was what she cared about most. It was the one thing she could not bear to lose.”

    She wanted, before all other things, to write. How would she make Ewan understand this?

    Maud’s Lifeline

    Maud’s fear of losing her writing is not unlike that of Sybil van Antwerp in The Correspondent, when she begins to lose her eyesight. But Sybil is being threatened by an actual illness; Maud’s trouble comes from an insecure man who is convinced, not only that women have one place in the world, but that her success is a threat to his place in the household.

    In the novel, Ewan is not outwardly unkind. But he has deep wounds that culminate in a grim belief in his own eternal damnation. This belief creates a shadow that destroys his family and torments his wife. Maud, who was never even fully sure that she wanted to be with him, is left alone to face his personal demons.

    The sting of After Anne is that the danger she faced was specific. The matter was never simply that Maud might marry the wrong man, or even that she would marry for money. It’s not even, really, that she could choose to remain a spinster.

    The danger is that her choice could involve surrendering the lifeline she had already discovered in writing. Maud does not consider writing to be a hobby she could put aside when she becomes a wife. It is the thing that makes her feel most fully herself.

    Ewan is not a simple villain, and Steiner does not make him one. I asked her about this, and she said:

    “Like many of us, he was limited but trying, and I was intent on rounding out his character. As much as I initially wanted a different relationship for Maud, I came to understand Ewan better as I reworked his scenes. I now see their marriage as a tragedy of circumstance rather than a tale of villainy.”

    Ewan’s struggles are human, even as their consequences become devastating for the people closest to him. I can sympathize with Ewan in a way that I never did with Tata, because Ewan did try, with what he could offer, to make Maud happy.

    Were he and Maud a poor match? Was Maud simply not meant to marry? We’ll never know. There is something sad about watching two people enter a marriage with hopeful hearts, only to discover that love cannot always overcome what each person carries inside.

    Conclusion: Finding Meaning in Words

    I finished After Anne thinking about all the women writers who understood that a meaningful life could be made from something other than marriage. This could be a house full of books, a desk by a window, a good ink pen.

    For Maud in After Anne, that life was not a consolation prize. It was the life she wanted. Perhaps that is what I found most moving about Logan Steiner’s portrayal of L. M. Montgomery. Anne Shirley is remembered for her enormous imagination. Anne feels great determination to make a life larger than the circumstances she was given.

    Behind Anne, there lived a woman who understood that longing, herself. Maud wanted to write and make stories. Though fond of Ewan, she did not want to surrender the part of her life that belonged to her.

    After Anne made me wonder what happens when a woman’s dreams refuse to settle neatly into the life imagined for her. Sometimes the dream is unwilling to be set aside. It demands that the person who carries it take it seriously.

    And perhaps this is its own kind of love story.

  • The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds: A Review

    The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds: A Review


    “Come.”

    It is the one-word summons that arrives by mail, calling English journalist Joseph Adelaide to the countryside of France. With this word, he’s summoned to the home of renowned but reclusive artist Edouard Tartuffe in The Artist and the Feast.

    Joseph has been waiting for this response, living in a Paris boardinghouse and hoping that he might finally be given the opportunity to tell the world about a man whose art has long been admired. But the venture is bizarre from the moment Joseph arrives at Tartuffe’s home.

    For one, Tartuffe cannot read the telegram Joseph offers as proof. He has no memory of inviting the journalist. Secondly, he lives with a niece named Essie who, though quiet as if afraid to make a sound, is clearly the driving force behind her uncle’s career—and indeed, his life.

    Tartuffe, or “Tata,” paints. Essie makes this possible by cooking, cleaning, minding the studio, and sorting the mail.

    Questions That Disturb

    The Artist and the Feast asks us, towards the end of the novel, what it means to love a monster.

    We learn much about Tartuffe in the chapters written from Essie’s viewpoint. She reveals to us that her uncle detests her as much as he needs her. He detests the memory of her mother, too.

    Her mother died after escaping to New York because she could no longer stand living as her brother’s servant. The trouble is that, when Essie’s mother left, she did not take the child.

    As a result, Essie immediately took up all of her mother’s duties—whether she knew how to perform them or not.

    Essie has felt called from childhood to create art of her own. Tartuffe destroyed those dreams—or thought that he did—by using cruel words and tearing up the pieces she was proud of.

    But art is story, and story does not die so easily.

    Essie soon finds other ways to follow her ambition.

    Her soul is wounded, but not broken, by her uncle. And Joseph Adelaide is present at the house to witness an explosion that has been a very long time coming.

    A Grief Shared

    Joseph soon feels for himself the same unease that Essie has suffered from every day of her life:

    “I should not fear Tata as much as I do, but there is something terrible about him, like looking into the eye of the sun. And God.”

    We are never quite offered a glimpse of Tata’s childhood. Was it so filled with monsters that he became one of them?

    The truth is that, to me, it does not matter if child Edouard was locked in a room with the devil himself. It is not the fault of Joseph and Essie. There is no excuse for the measures he has always taken to destroy anything that makes Essie happy, and then make it so that she has no option but to remain in his home as a slave.

    It is not surprising that, trapped as she was in such an environment, Essie has developed a confused idea of what love is. Nor is it surprising that she has resorted to the solace of nightfall, the only time when she can escape his vicinity and breathe.

    And in those moments of darkness, she quietly concocts a way in which she might destroy him back.

    The Niece’s Revenge

    Essie has never stopped painting.

    She begins to copy the work of her uncle, finding solace in the process after the harrowing work of serving as a volunteer nurse during the Great War. She copies all of his work until it is impossible to tell the difference between their styles.

    And then she asks herself: why is his work worth more than hers, if visually there is no difference at all? Why is there so much weight merely in his name?

    He has lied and told her that women cannot go to study art. Joseph reveals the truth: certain schools are welcoming female students.

    Why did Tata lie about this?

    Why is he so afraid of Essie learning to use a paintbrush? Is he scared that she might leave him to care for himself in that house so far away from the world? Is he scared that she might surpass him in skill?

    Is it both?

    Under this dark story arc is a truly romantic subplot that I found beautiful.

    Joseph sees Essie, even when she goes to great lengths to hide herself. She sees in him an honest man that she eventually trusts with her greatest secret. He sees not only a muse, but a brilliant mind, and encourages her to try once more to make art of her own.

    Tata tried to muffle her, but Joseph does the opposite.

    He wants to know what she has to show the world.

    I believe that is true love.

    Conclusion: The Artist and the Feast

    The Artist and the Feast is loaded with tension from the first page. We know that something is going to explode, and we are eager to see it happen. We want to see Essie live. We want her to break free and see the world.

    The novel’s ending is truly so satisfying.

    What a gift of a story.

    Art, and story, have always been stronger than any human attempts to stop them. A story might be “put out” for a while, but so long as there are people willing to put pen to paper, it will resurface in a new voice centuries later.

    We cannot stop it any more than Tartuffe was able to.

    We are storytelling creatures.

    It pulses through us in our very blood.

  • After Anne: An Interview with Logan Steiner

    After Anne: An Interview with Logan Steiner


    Literature often presents itself as a bizarre form of magic. An author can find herself writing a novel that, emotionally, is far from how she feels in real life. This was the case for L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, for much of her life.

    Montgomery created worlds of color. These worlds were saturated with the beauty of nature, populated by protagonists such as Anne Shirley, who were prone to dreamy epiphanies. She used words to paint worlds of light. Yet it came to be known, after her death, that she suffered from depression for much of the time she spent writing about Avonlea.

    After Anne by Logan Steiner is one of my favorite novels. It centers on the life of L.M. “Maud” Montgomery before and after her marriage. We are delighted by scenes in which she “meets” and begins writing about Anne. We also witness Maud’s emotional transformation as she meets her future husband, Ewan MacGregor, and develops affection for him. We soon discover that affection is not enough to erase the questions she carries into their marriage.

    I reached out to Logan Steiner and asked if she would answer some questions about After Anne in preparation for my review, which I will publish soon. To my delight, she agreed, and I had the privilege of discussing one of my favorite novels with its author.

    Here’s the interview. If you haven’t yet read After Anne, I highly recommend you do so. Logan Steiner can be reached at Substack and her personal website.

    Q: You write Maud as someone who recognizes very early that marriage could either deepen her life or diminish it. What drew you to that tension in Montgomery’s life, and how did you approach imagining what she might have been thinking and feeling as she considered marriage?

    A: Yes, this tension! You’ve captured it well. Maud’s talent and fame set her apart, but her marriage decision is so relatable. We all wish we had perfect foresight on whether and whom to marry, so I hoped this focus would help readers connect. I found Maud’s premonitions around marrying Ewan fascinating—along with the possibility that she added some of those ideas while editing her journals in midlife, with the benefit of hindsight.

    I based my portrayal of Maud’s conflicting thoughts about marriage largely on her own journals. I then imagined the birthday weekend as a time missing from her journals when that tension might have come to a head.

    Q: Maud’s relationship with writing is almost a love story in itself. She knows that writing is the one thing she “could not bear to lose.” Did you see her literary ambition as something that competed with her desire for love, or did you see writing as the deeper love in her life?

    A: I do think Maud had a deeper love story with writing than she did with Ewan. Writing was her refuge. When those stories competed, writing inevitably came out on top, to Ewan’s dismay. That is not to say that marriage and creativity need to compete. But Maud’s story shows how difficult a creative path can be when paired with an insecure partner.

    Q: Ewan is not portrayed as an obviously cruel man. Instead, his insecurities, wounds, and beliefs gradually become more troubling. Why was it important to you to write a man whose danger is more complicated than simple villainy?

    A: I rewrote the scenes with Ewan more than any others in the novel. Like many of us, he was limited but trying, and I was intent on rounding out his character. As much as I initially wanted a different relationship for Maud, I came to understand Ewan better as I reworked his scenes. I now see their marriage as a tragedy of circumstance rather than a tale of villainy.

    Q: Maud’s cousin, Frede, challenges Ewan when he asks about her “womanly ambitions.” She asks him whether he would have asked the same questions if she were a man. What did you hope Frede would illuminate about the expectations placed on women in Maud’s world—and, perhaps, about the kind of friendship Maud needed?

    A: Frede put plainly what I thought many readers would feel—that societal pressures on women can run counter to living a full life. Maud and Frede’s relationship reminded me of friends in my life whose honesty and openness puts me at ease. I love being around people who say the thing without worrying constantly how someone else will hear the thing. That was Frede to Maud.

    Q: Maud’s fear of losing her writing reminded me of Sybil van Antwerp in The Correspondent, whose eyesight threatens her ability to read and write. Both women are confronted with the possibility of losing the thing that gives their lives meaning. Did you think of Maud’s relationship with writing as a kind of survival?

    A: Yes. Mary Oliver says in her poem The Journey that she wrote “to save the only life [she] could save.” Writing, particularly journaling, is a life-saving force for me. That’s one way I immediately connected with Maud; I do think it was a matter of survival for her too. Like Sybil van Antwerp (one of my favorite characters of recent decades!), when Maud started to lose her connection to writing, she lost her center of gravity.

    Q: There are moments when Maud seems almost instinctively wary of Ewan, even before she can articulate why. How much did you want the novel to explore the experience of a woman sensing something about another person that she cannot yet prove or explain?

    A: I’ve recently come to realize just how much intuition has guided big decisions in my life, and I’m fascinated by the extent to which some part of us just knows. Maud’s journals show the conflict that can arise between intuition and reason. Despite her instincts, part of her wanted to simply marry the man who looked good on paper, as society expected. I sought to explore that conflict in the novel.

    Q: Montgomery, Jane Austen, and Louisa May Alcott all wrote extensively about romance while creating lives centered on their own work. Did your research into Montgomery change the way you think about the relationship between the romantic heroines these women created and the women they were themselves?

    A: My research deepened my respect for writers who create enduring love stories out of imagination rather than direct experience. It may be that unfulfilled desire creates more yearning and interest in describing the path to desire fulfilled.

    Q: If you could ask L.M. Montgomery one question about the life she actually lived—not Anne’s life, not Maud’s imagined life, but her own—which question would you most want to ask her?

    A: What do you understand now that you couldn’t have understood earlier?

    Q: And, because this is The Tearoom: if L.M. Montgomery could join us at the table for an afternoon, which books would you want to put beside her teacup, and why?

    A: I’d love that tea. I’d be most curious about her relationship with her own work, so I’d put The Story Girl beside her (her favorite of her novels), along with a journal or two. And The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, so we could share favorite lines.

    A Final Word

    Reading After Anne made me think about the strange distance that can exist between the worlds a writer creates and the life she is actually living. Montgomery gave generations of readers a world filled with beauty, friendship, imagination, and hope, even while carrying private struggles that those readers could not see.

    Logan Steiner’s novel invites us to look beyond Anne and toward the woman who created her—to consider Maud not simply as the author of beloved books, but as a woman trying to make a life in which writing, love, friendship, and independence could coexist.

    I’m especially grateful to Logan for joining me at the Tearoom table to talk about these questions. Her answers only deepened my affection for After Anne, and for Maud herself.

    And perhaps that is one of the gifts of literary historical fiction: sometimes it allows us to meet the woman behind the work, and in doing so, to understand the work we thought we already knew.

  • 6 Books I’d Gift to a Woman I Care For

    6 Books I’d Gift to a Woman I Care For


    Not long ago, literacy was a gift that was not offered to women in quite the same way it was offered to their brothers. Boys were more likely to receive thorough educations, preparing them for university and, in many cases, professions that would give their family name another generation of distinction.

    Daughters were often educated differently, if they were educated at all. Their lessons were more likely to prepare them for the work expected of them: keeping a household, cooking, sewing, raising children, and managing the many small details of domestic life. Go far enough back—to the eighteenth century, for instance—and the educational opportunities available to a girl could be astonishingly limited. Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s sister, had little formal schooling and taught herself much of what she knew.

    When I think about giving a woman I love a book, I am thinking about far more than the front and back covers with pages in between.

    I am thinking about the privilege of being able to open a book simply because I want to.

    I dream of giving books to my girlfriends because we have inherited something that generations of women had to fight, improvise, or sacrifice to obtain: the freedom to read.

    “But this sounds terribly boring,” a woman might protest, particularly if she isn’t a lover of literature in the way that I am. “Can’t you just get me a gift card?”

    I understand. Reading is not everyone’s idea of a good time. Some women would much rather receive something practical, or perhaps a piece of costume jewelry to complement their latest ensemble.

    And costume jewelry isn’t a bad thing. There is a place in life for everything.

    But I am of the sort who wants to give books to her friends.

    So, if I discovered that a birthday was approaching and I hadn’t yet found a present, these are six of the first books that would cross my mind. They are books about womanhood, education, friendship, family, independence, and the possibility of becoming more fully ourselves.

    A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

    This important piece of literature is so short that it is really more of an essay. In spite of its few pages, Woolf touches on subjects that remain remarkably relevant today. Her thoughts on womanhood, and on what women needed to possess in order to live and work successfully, were far ahead of her time.

    I would think of gifting this to a casual reader precisely because of its length. There are equally important observations about womanhood tucked into Middlemarch, but for someone who does not particularly love books, it might be less intimidating to make their way through Woolf’s essay—and, in doing so, encounter the truths she lays out so candidly.

    It is a small book that asks some very large questions.

    Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

    Women have traditionally been looked at as the caretakers of a family. This is no bad thing. In a loving family, daughters and sons should be honored to care for their parents—or for other relatives—in the same way that they were once cared for, long before they could even walk.

    There is great honor in being the person who cares for aging relatives, hurting siblings, or those in need within a community. But women are also allowed to crave more, and to acknowledge that they might want more from life.

    In Excellent Women, English author Barbara Pym has such a tender understanding of women who are observant, capable, and perhaps a little too accustomed to putting themselves second.

    I’d want you to know that a quiet life is not necessarily a small one—and that you don’t have to disappear in order to be good.

    Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

    I would give Remarkably Bright Creatures to a woman who has spent so much of her life taking care of everyone else that she has forgotten she is allowed to have a life of her own.

    Shelby Van Pelt’s novel is gentle without being frivolous. At its center is Tova Sullivan, an older woman whose life has been shaped by loss, loneliness, work, and responsibility. What I love most is the novel’s understanding that a life can change even after we have convinced ourselves that it is already finished changing.

    There is something comforting about being reminded that friendship can arrive at unexpected ages and in unexpected forms, and that loneliness does not have to be permanent.

    I would hand this book to a woman I love and tell her: there is still so much life waiting for you.

    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

    I haven’t actually read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman yet, which perhaps makes its place on this list a little unusual. But it is one of those books that I want the women I love to know exists.

    Published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument was remarkably direct: women were not born intellectually inferior to men, but were being denied the education and opportunities that would allow them to develop their minds.

    That makes it a particularly fitting book for this list. When I think about the women who came before us, and how many were discouraged from reading, writing, studying, or thinking beyond the boundaries prescribed for them, I feel a certain gratitude for the fact that I can now pick up a book simply because I want to understand something.

    I would give this one to a woman as a reminder of something Wollstonecraft understood centuries ago: a woman’s mind is worth cultivating.

    Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

    I would give Anne of Green Gables to a woman who has ever felt that she was too much of something: too imaginative, too talkative, too emotional, too strange, or simply too different from the people around her.

    Anne Shirley enters the world as an unwanted orphan and gradually finds something she has desperately wanted all along: a place where she belongs. But what I love about Anne is that she doesn’t have to become less herself in order to earn that belonging. Her imagination, her ambitions, her temper, and her enormous capacity for feeling are not things she ultimately has to apologize for.

    There is also something wonderfully feminine about watching Anne grow up. She wants an education. She wants friendship. She wants beautiful things. She wants to write. She wants to make something of herself.

    I would give this book to a woman I love as a reminder that growing up does not have to mean becoming smaller.

    You are allowed to remain a little bit Anne.

    Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

    I believe every woman needs to encounter the March sisters at least once in her life. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are so different from one another, yet they remain bound by one of the greatest ties there is: sisterly love.

    There is a scene in which, in a fit of rage, Amy throws her older sister Jo’s manuscript into the fire. I don’t think this scene is talked about enough, because what follows is a quarrel of fearsome proportions. Sisters fight, and Amy and Jo certainly did. They each managed to wound the other deeply, and yet neither could stay angry forever.

    Little Women is not simply the story of a peaceful family waiting out the winter while Father is away at war. It touches on the many sides of sisterhood, including the ugly and the unfortunate. I would want you to read it so that you might know that even if you one day fight with your sister over something that seems terribly important in the moment, it doesn’t mean that the love is gone. Reconciliation is possible.

    The lessons one can uncover in Little Women are, truly, timeless.

    I Love Giving Books to Women

    A book is such a small thing to place in someone’s hands, yet it can contain an entire world. It can remind you that other women have felt what you feel, wondered what you wonder, made mistakes, wanted more, loved fiercely, and sometimes had to begin again.

    The women who came before us were not always given the freedom to read whatever they pleased. I don’t want to take that freedom for granted. I want to celebrate it by filling the hands of the women I love with books.

    So if a birthday is coming up and you’re wondering what to give your mother, your sister, your daughter, or your dearest friend, perhaps give her a book.

    And if she doesn’t like it, well—there’s always costume jewelry.

    Cover Image: Louise Tiffany, Reading (1888) by Louis Comfort Tiffany

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  • 5 Novels That Celebrate the Power of Female Friendship

    5 Novels That Celebrate the Power of Female Friendship


    Over the years, literature has blessed us with great stories about female friendship.

    These novels hit best when they offer readers a full range of color. They should not only depict happy moments, but also those of pain and grief. Light and shadow: this variety creates a strong foundation.

    Such novels acknowledge that strong friendship cannot exist without storms. We will not spend our whole lives making daisy chains together in a field; there will be arguments. In some cases, there might be years of no contact because of a misunderstanding.

    Humans are complicated, therefore friendship is complicated. Novels allow us to explore joyous moments between women who share the joys and sorrows of life. The strongest friends I have known, in real life and in novels, knew each other from childhood to death.

    What I love most about the theme of female friendship is that not all friendships look the same. Two women can love one another, yet be bound by different seasons of life, loyalties, and more.

    If you are looking for books about female friendship—perhaps to soothe a hurt, strengthen a bond, or simply remind you of the complicated beauty of having a companion—here are five I recommend.

    Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

    Some might protest that Little Women does not belong here. After all, it is a novel focused on sisters and the challenges the March girls face as they grow up together. But a person who makes this argument forgets something important: one must be friends with her sisters, too.

    I have heard of too many sisters who, for one reason or another, stopped speaking to each other. Eventually they lost contact. My grandmother and her sister died without ever speaking to one another again. I don’t know what caused the rift, and perhaps I never will. I can still urge you, dear reader, not to let this happen.

    There are plenty of important friendships in Little Women, not only female friendship. Consider the March girls’ adventures with their wealthy neighbor, Laurie. The book would not have been the same without him and his creative energy.

    Truly, Little Women has much to teach us about life—not just sisterhood or friendship, but the importance of loving people while we still have the chance.

    Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

    Barbara Pym understood that female friendship does not always announce itself with grand declarations or dramatic reconciliations. Sometimes it looks like a cup of tea, a shared confidence, a bit of gossip, or simply having someone who understands why a seemingly insignificant thing matters.

    In Excellent Women, Mildred Lathbury is a single woman living a quiet, respectable life in postwar England. She is the sort of woman everyone depends upon. People confide in her, ask for her help, and assume she will be there when needed. She observes the romantic entanglements and domestic complications of the people around her with a mixture of amusement, affection, and occasional exasperation.

    What I love about this novel is the way it honors the friendships and relationships women build outside of romance. Mildred’s life is not empty simply because she is unmarried. Her friendships give her companionship, purpose, and a place in the lives of other people.

    There is something deeply comforting about Excellent Women. It reminds us that a meaningful life can be made up of ordinary days and that friendship does not have to be dramatic to be important. Sometimes having a woman to sit beside, confide in, laugh with, or quietly observe the absurdities of life alongside is more than enough.

    The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick

    There has been a delightful trend in recent years of novels centered around the idea of the book club. Why are women, in particular, so drawn to the idea of gathering around books?

    I suspect part of the answer is historical. For generations, women were discouraged from pursuing education and intellectual life on equal terms with men. Perhaps that is one reason we have seized the book club with such a fierce enthusiasm. We finally have our own tables.

    The Book Club for Troublesome Women has become a favorite among modern readers for its feminist themes and its setting in the 1960s, during the Kennedy presidency. But I think what makes this novel especially appealing is the friendship at its center. Four women, very different from one another, find themselves joined during trying times by their love of books and their desire for certain freedoms that society was only reluctantly beginning to offer them.

    That is the magic of a book club. We may walk into the room as strangers, with different histories, opinions, and personalities, but we arrive with at least one thing in common: we have all read the book.

    Many of us may never join an actual book club, but I think the meaning behind the idea matters just as much. We all want someplace to belong. A book possesses a strong enough foundation on which to build that place.

    The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

    Sometimes the friendships we need are not the ones we expected to make. We meet someone because of circumstance, because we happen to be sitting beside one another, or because we are all desperate to escape the same dreary February.

    That is essentially how The Enchanted April begins. Four women, very different in temperament and circumstance, find themselves drawn together by the promise of an Italian castle in spring. They decide to rent it together, and what begins as a practical arrangement slowly becomes something much more meaningful.

    What I love about this novel is that these women do not have to become best friends immediately. They have their differences, their grievances, and their own ideas about how life ought to be lived. But the beauty of friendship is that it can give us room to change. In the company of other women, we sometimes remember parts of ourselves that have been neglected.

    The Italian garden becomes almost a character in its own right, but the real enchantment is what happens between the women. They begin to see one another differently—and, in doing so, begin to see themselves differently.

    The Enchanted April is a lovely reminder that sometimes what we need most is not a solution to our lives, but a change of scenery and a few good women to share it with.

    The Secrets of Flight by Maggie Leffler

    There is no age limit on friendship. In The Secrets of Flight by Maggie Leffler, we meet an elderly woman who belongs to a creative writing group made up mostly of people her own age. Then a sixteen-year-old girl with dreams of becoming an author begins attending the group. She is starry-eyed about the first story she has written—the story that has opened the door to a life of creativity—and at first, her youth makes her an oddity among the older writers.

    But stories have a remarkable way of making strangers understand one another. The young girl and the older women discover that the things that matter to us as human beings do not necessarily change with age. The desire to create, to be heard, to tell our stories, and to make sense of our lives belongs to all of us.

    The Secrets of Flight reminds us that friendship can cross generations. We need the wisdom of those who have lived longer than we have, just as we have something to offer those who are still beginning their lives. Story becomes the bridge between them—a way for the past and the future to sit together at the same table.

    We all need one another. And sometimes the person who has the most to teach us is someone we might never have thought to call a friend.

    Why I Love Novels About Female Friendship

    The best books about female friendship remind us that there is no single definition of what it means to be a friend. Some friendships begin in childhood. Others arrive later in life. Some are built around books, creativity, or shared interests. Others survive arguments, distance, and years of change.

    That may be why stories about women and friendship remain so compelling. They remind us that none of us are meant to live entirely alone.

    And perhaps the next great friendship in your life will begin with a book.

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  • Dolly Parton Could Tell a Story

    Dolly Parton Could Tell a Story


    “There is a healthy amount of dreaming that has to be done for any project to really be worthwhile. All of those doors have to be knocked on. Some have to be slammed in your face.”

    Dolly Parton – My Life and Other Unfinished Business

    Our most beloved stars do us a great service when they leave behind memoirs. The quote above by Dolly Parton is not only relevant to those who seek lives in the music industry. It reminds us that no one can achieve their goals immediately.

    Dreaming does, and must, take place before we reach our destination, sometimes for years and years. (Many of my favorite authors did not publish debut novels until well into their sixties.) And we must learn to be grateful for the doors that are slammed along the way; they might be numerous, but with patience, we will reach the place we were meant to be all along—we will reach home.

    Storytelling Dolly

    No one could have been more authorized to speak on the topic than Dolly. She was born to Robert Lee and Avie Parton on January 19, 1946; the Partons would eventually total twelve children, of whom Dolly was the fourth. They lived in extreme poverty, but Dolly was always quick to assure her listeners that, while they did not have everything they wanted, they found ways to be happy.

    Her childhood was rich, in fact—rich in music and storytelling. These were skills that she honed very young and which would eventually earn her fame. As a child, she sang on local radio and television programs. She always knew that she was going to be a star. She had appeared at the Grand Ole Opry by the age of ten. At thirteen, she made her first recording for a small Louisiana label. After graduating from high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville to pursue music professionally.

    Following the news of Dolly’s death on August 25, I realized that while she was the type of woman I admire, I’ve always known very little about her. I had never paid attention to any of her songs. But even considering this want of information, her loss was a shock to wake up to, and a void that I—and all of us—have been feeling consistently since it happened.

    I have begun to think that, underneath all of this, what I am feeling is the absence of a great storyteller. As I sifted through some of her greatest hits, I was struck by the purity and light with which she spins her yarns.

    Coat of Many Colors

    “Coat of Many Colors” is a particularly tender song in which Dolly’s talent for storytelling shines.

    In the early chapters of her autobiography, My Life and Other Unfinished Business, she dedicates several pages to the story behind this song. Dolly lovingly tells her audience that her mother had a gift for sewing and quilting.

    Dolly writes about one particularly cold fall, during which she did not have a coat:

    Mama began to make me a coat. … she knew me and my personality, so she decided to make my coat out of the brightest, most colorful colors she could find.

    This matches her lyrics, which say:

    My coat of many colors
    That my mama made for me
    Made only from rags
    But I wore it so proudly

    In the book, she describes her first day wearing that coat to school:

    I burst through the school doors like a multicolored whirlwind, wondering just how many people I could find to admire my coat. I was so proud of it. I wanted to be seen in it. I wanted to be noticed. ‘See my new coat?’ I said to one boy. ‘Naw,’ he sneered, ‘it looks like a bunch of rags.’

    In the book, she proclaims “Coat of Many Colors” to be her favorite song that she ever wrote or sang. The thing about songs like this is that we can all relate to it in some way. Maternal love is heavy in the lyrics, as is the value of a gift that takes time and effort to complete.

    The original coat worn by Dolly is gone; it was passed from child to child in the Parton family until it eventually disintegrated, leaving only the loving memory of it behind. Her mother made a replica years later, and that replica was displayed, along with the handwritten lyrics to the song, at Dollywood.

    Dolly, in her storytelling genius, demonstrated that beautiful art can be created using scraps of memory and the stitches of a mother’s love.

    We’re Not That Different

    It is evident in Dolly’s writing style that she was an avid reader: her tone is humorous and light, and she does not take herself too seriously. As I read her book, I felt as if I were sitting with a very dear friend, listening to her witticisms and anecdotes.

    She is honest about the struggles she experienced, but she is also able to reflect on the ways in which they made her a stronger woman.

    One of the things I loved most was encountering Dolly the reader behind the songwriter. She has spoken affectionately about books throughout her life, and some of her literary loves feel appropriate for the woman she became. She has mentioned The Secret Garden, a book about a neglected girl discovering a hidden place and, in the process, discovering herself. She has also spoken about The Little House on the Prairie books, which seems equally fitting. And then there is The Velveteen Rabbit, with its tender idea that love and experience are what make us real.

    Dolly has spent her career telling people that being “real” matters more than appearing perfect. Perhaps that is part of why her songs have such warmth to them. She understood that a tale does not have to be grand to be meaningful. Sometimes it only needs a bit of hardship and someone who knows how to tell the story afterward.

    For all the extraordinary things she accomplished, the woman behind them was recognizably human. She grew up with books. She loved stories. She made something of the circumstances she was given.

    Reading her memoir, I kept thinking about how easy it is to imagine that people like Dolly Parton belong to some different category of human being. She is, after all, Dolly Parton. But beneath the woman in rhinestones lived a girl who had very little–but, in truth, she was rich. She had a family, a dream, and a story to tell.

    And maybe that is the most encouraging thing about her.

    We are not that different.

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  • Marmee Was the Real Hero of Little Women

    Marmee Was the Real Hero of Little Women


    A North Star Called Marmee

    Little Women is one of the most famous pieces of literature in the English canon. It is taught in schools and passed from parent to child as a loving gift or family heirloom. Even those who are not deep readers have some idea of the adventures shared by Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The many film adaptations have only increased our interest in returning to the original classic.

    We celebrate Jo’s courage and fiery personality. We laugh at the antics of Amy as she attempts to find her way in a rapidly changing world. We grieve Beth as she struggles with an illness and, ultimately, succumbs to it. But behind all of these iconic characters stands a voice of reason, a North Star guiding them all: Marmee March.

    All great novels have a Marmee March, a guide. These are the characters whose influence we sometimes fail to notice until we see how their actions have shaped the ending. Quiet as they might have been for the forty chapters of drama, by the end it is inconceivable that the novel could have taken place without them.

    In novels, as in real life, there is often a person behind the successes or failures of our protagonists. This wise man or woman offers comfort and sage advice when the protagonist finds themselves in a crisis. Sometimes they are the ones quietly pulling the strings, shaping the people around them without ever demanding the spotlight for themselves.

    Little Women’s wise woman, without a doubt, is Marmee. Whenever her daughters find themselves in one of their famous mishaps, she is ready with a word of advice or a life lesson that will ease their mortification or strengthen them to move forward with the choices they have made.

    Without Marmee, Little Women would be a very different story. Imagine Little Women if Marmee did not hold this worldview:

    “I’d rather see you as the happy wives of poor men, or even respectable old maids, than queens on thrones without peace or self-respect.”

    That single conviction changes everything. Marmee does not raise her daughters to pursue wealth, status, beauty, or even marriage for its own sake. She raises them to become women who know their own worth. Whatever happens to them, she wants them to have something that cannot be given to them by a husband, a fortune, or a place in society: self-respect.

    Who Was Abby May?

    It is natural that Mrs. March should be such an important presence in the March household. Louisa May Alcott herself had a very special relationship with her own mother, Abby May. In the biography Marmee and Louisa, Eve LaPlante explores this relationship in depth, and I believe it is an important book for any admirer of Alcott to read.

    Because Louisa’s writing career has so often been discussed alongside the work and philosophy of her father, Bronson Alcott, it can seem as though Abby May has disappeared from the story.

    But many mothers prefer to care for their children and help build their lives from a place in the shadows, allowing their sons and daughters to grow—and even make mistakes—on their own.

    Of Louisa’s two parents, Abby May was clearly the one of saner mind. While Bronson was off preaching his strange philosophy and planning the Fruitlands plantation, Abby May was worrying about how she was going to raise her four young daughters into strong women. Many times, Bronson went away on “work trips” and returned home with little to show for them.

    When, in Little Women, Mrs. March is the parent who is most present, we have to ask ourselves: Is that a coincidence?

    Louisa May loved her father, but can a woman who endured so many struggles as a child truly bear to put Bronson and Abby May on the same level?

    How Abby May Survives in Marmee

    Abby May may have disappeared somewhat from the popular story of the Alcott family, but she did not disappear from her daughter’s imagination. She survives in Little Women as Marmee, the doting mother who can keep a home in her husband’s absence—and yet is not above letting her daughters make mistakes and learn from them.

    Marmee is the person who holds the family together when circumstances threaten to pull it apart. She manages the household, comforts her daughters, disciplines them when necessary, and—perhaps most importantly—teaches them that becoming a good woman requires more than being obedient or pleasant.

    But, in my opinion, the most important thing Marmee did was allow her daughters to become their own people. We can see in each of the four March girls that they developed different passions, qualities, and tempers. Marmee never insists that one daughter must become like another. She meets her girls where they are.

    She knows that Meg does not have to be Jo, that Beth does not have to be Amy, and that each of them will have to discover her own way of becoming a woman. Marmee gives them guidance without trying to live their lives for them.

    She doesn’t only guide Jo through anger, but confesses that she can relate to it:

    “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I’ve learned not to show it. And I still hope not to feel it.”

    Marmee understands that Jo is a soul who can lose her temper with ease, and reminds her that words said in anger cannot be taken back. Meg, who recalls a life before the Marches fell into poverty, continues to live with vanity in her soul. Marmee is sympathetic to her nostalgia, but reminds her that it is possible—and necessary—to be happy with what we have.

    Amy is spoiled and thoughtless. Beth, quieter than her sisters, must learn to confront the limitations imposed upon her by her own nature and circumstances. Each of the four girls is a challenge of her own, and Marmee takes on this challenge with joy.

    She even opens her heart to Laurie, the neighbor boy who does not have a mother figure of his own.

    We All Need Marmee

    Abby May Alcott had a unique sort of love herself. Even when her husband returned from his long business trips with little to show for them, she welcomed him into the home with tender arms. She taught her daughters to respect him and even followed him when he came up with new schemes, absurd as they might have been. Her love for him did not mean she could not see his faults. Perhaps it meant that she understood how to love someone while seeing them clearly.

    In Little Women, Marmee is absent in the first chapter because she has gone to visit her husband, who is ill in the hospital in Washington, D.C. We all remember the opening pages of Little Women: “How dreadful it is to be poor!” And we remember the lengths to which the March girls go together to ensure that their mother’s homecoming is warm and comfortable.

    In raising her four daughters to be themselves, seeing their strengths as well as their weaknesses, Marmee also saw us. We, the readers, might not have realized at the time of reading how special Marmee was becoming to us. Now I’m in my thirties, and I realize that she is one of the most sensible women I’ve ever “met.”

    Aspire to Be Like Marmee

    Perhaps this is why, as I grow older, I find myself admiring Marmee more than I did when I first encountered Little Women. As a girl, I understood that she was kind. As a woman, I realize that kindness was only the beginning.

    Marmee was patient without being passive. She was loving without being indulgent. She knew her daughters intimately—their weaknesses as well as their gifts—and she never seemed to confuse loving them with pretending they had no faults.

    Most importantly, she wanted them to become women in their own right. She did not need them to follow the same path she had followed. She did not need them to make the choices she would have made. She simply wanted them to become women who could stand firmly on their own feet, make their own choices, and live with peace and self-respect.

    We do not all have four daughters to raise, or a March household to manage, or a husband away in Washington. But we all have people whose lives we touch. We can be the person who offers wisdom when someone is ashamed of a mistake. We can be the person who reminds a young woman that her life does not have to look like anyone else’s. We can make room for people to become themselves.

    Abby May gave Louisa an example of that kind of woman. Louisa gave that example to the world in Marmee. And more than a century later, Marmee is waiting for us in the pages of Little Women, reminding us of what a woman can be.

    Marilla Cuthbert taught Anne that family can be formed from people we’ve never met before. Marmee taught her daughters that sisterhood, in this case bound by blood, can be stronger than any quarrel. Indeed, there are many ways to be a family.

    May we all have a Marmee who will give advice like this:

    “Oh, Jo. Jo, you have so many extraordinary gifts; how can you expect to lead an ordinary life? You’re ready to go out and—and find a good use for your talent. … Go, and embrace your liberty. And see what wonderful things come of it.”

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  • The Language of Butterflies: An Interview with Wendy Williams

    The Language of Butterflies: An Interview with Wendy Williams


    Wings to Please the Eye

    The natural world is full of wonders beyond human imagining. Even just a walk through a nearby park will expose us to colors and sounds that we could never imitate ourselves: wild birds and rabbits, things that swim and creep.

    Insects have an interesting place in this grand scheme. Many people revile them—rightfully so, perhaps, as an encounter with the wrong kind of spider could lead to a long and painful death. But there are other insects that are harmless, that exist to pollinate our favorite flowers or simply to please the eye.

    Butterflies are among those creatures that seem to have been made simply to give humans something to marvel at. There are not many people who see a pair of white butterflies, called Cabbage Whites (or Pieris rapae), and recoil in fear.

    Cabbage White Butterfly

    Instead, myths have been dreamed up surrounding them. While in truth they are likely mating, some believe that the sight of a white butterfly signifies the visitation of a deceased loved one.

    There’s a Study for That

    There is a word for the study of butterflies and moths: lepidopterology. An entire branch of science exists dedicated to these surreal bursts of color—the butterflies and moths that punctuate our otherwise uneventful lives. A walk to the mailbox on a heavy summer afternoon suddenly becomes magical at the glimpse of a monarch butterfly.

    The love for butterflies is universal. In the first chapter of The Language of Butterflies, author Wendy Williams explains how these creatures have influenced society for many, many centuries, remarking that during the Victorian era, everyone—men and women—participated in the quest to collect and name these creatures:

    “Throughout Europe and North America, insect collecting was considered not only a healthy activity, but a way to honor God and His earthly works—and was therefore acceptable even in dour cultures where play was frowned upon.”

    She adds something poignant that paleontologist Richard Fortey wrote in his personal memoir, Dry Storeroom No. I: “Indeed, humanity had a ‘duty to inventory.’” It was a duty based in Biblical texts, recalling that God formed every living thing on Earth—then gave Adam the privilege of naming them.

    Everything Needs a Name

    Butterfly enthusiasts reasoned that, of course, they must be collected before they could be named. Williams adds a list of other things that the Victorians considered worthy of collecting and naming, quoting Jim Endersby in Imperial Nature:

    “From shells, seaweeds, flowers, and insects to coins, autographs, books, and bus tickets, Victorians of every class collected, classified, and arranged their treasures before exchanging unwanted finds with other enthusiasts.”

    The Language of Butterflies is one of the few books that I’ve read more than once. Each time, it reminds me of the beauty and sheer poetry that can be found in nature, the wonder that is available to us if we should only step out of the door.

    For this reason, I took a risk and wrote to Wendy Williams herself, asking if she would be willing to answer some questions about this piece of nonfiction, this memoir that I considered so important. I was greatly honored when she replied in the affirmative, and I am delighted today to share my conversation with Wendy Williams.

    The Interview

    Q: When you were writing about butterflies, did you ever feel as though you were also writing about attention itself—about what it means to truly notice something small enough to be overlooked?

    A: Yes. Of course, I had seen butterflies all my life. Taken them for granted. Because they were so common in my childhood, I never really noticed them. Never paid attention to them. But when I started to notice them in a deeper way, I began to experience nature in a deeper way.

    There’s the old saw about stopping to smell the roses. I’d now say stop to take a look at the seemingly nondescript all around you. Consider the wildflowers that you might have been taught were “just weeds.” Now we know that these “weeds” are an essential foundation to the web of life and beauty we see all around us. So there may be more there than meets the eye.

    Q: Was there a moment during your research for The Language of Butterflies when a particular species or behavior surprised you so deeply that it changed the emotional direction of the book?

    A: What surprised me—truly surprised me—was the history of human passion when it came to the colors on a butterfly wing. Poor old Herman Strecker. He was so lost and alone and perpetually sad. Somehow butterflies filled that void. When he finally acquired a butterfly he’d only seen in books, his life was made whole. Why? I only wish that he could have seen the magnificent Ornithoptera actually flying, with its wings glinting in the sunlight.

    Or consider the passion of Maria Sibylla Merian. She was so struck by a large blue butterfly that she embarked on her very own self-funded scientific expedition to the Western Hemisphere just to learn about its life cycle. And this was centuries ago. Of course, I fell in love with her. She just had to know.

    Q: Butterflies move between fragility and resilience in a way that feels almost contradictory. Did you find yourself drawn more to their vulnerability, or to their endurance?

    A: Both. Because the phenomenon begs the question: How can vulnerability and endurance co-exist in one single organism? How can a tiny insect that lives for only a few days also migrate over the Himalayas in freezing temperatures? Sometimes those of us who seem most fragile in the world turn out to be the most enduring.

    Q: In the Tearoom, we often think about the way books teach us to slow down. What did writing about butterflies teach you about slowness, if anything at all?

    A: I remember one time I was walking up a mountain path in a national park. The path was so crowded, and everyone was hurrying to get to the top of the mountain trail—just so they could get back down. It was a stunning day, sunny and bright and warm but not hot. Butterflies were everywhere, but no one stopped to look. They were all absorbed in their own little worlds.

    When we have the opportunity to be in an extraordinary place, I’m often surprised by how few people take the time to notice—really notice—where they are. I’m gonna kvetch here: The phenomenon of competitive trail running is just a mystery to me. You get to the other end, but have no idea where you’ve been. What’s the point of racing like that?

    Thoreau, of course, would be horrified: You go into the woods to live deliberately.

    Painted Lady Butterfly

    Q: If a reader closes The Language of Butterflies and carries only one quiet thought into their day, what would you hope it is?

    A: While researching my next book, about dogs, I was recently walking through a small village on the remote Greek island of Amorgos. Meandering down a side alley, I noticed some handmade bronze earrings displayed in a glass case just outside a tiny shop. The earrings were of butterflies. Of course I had to go into the shop. It was filled with butterfly earrings. I bought a pair, which is very unusual for me. I’m just not a “buying” kind of person. Now I wear them everywhere. They remind me of the specialness of nature.

    As I’m sure you know, psyche is the Greek word for butterfly—and for soul. The human love for butterflies is universal. As I explained in the book, it stopped a high-altitude climber making his way over the Himalayas, “conquering the mountain” (as if we mere humans could ever do such a thing), who never expected to see butterflies glinting in the sunlight in that frozen world.

    Butterflies teach us: Expect the unexpected.

    Conclusion & Beginning

    It would not seem, at first glance, that humans could have much to learn from butterflies—but as Williams pointed out in our interview, certain butterflies have such determination, such an ability to respond to wind and weather, that they can fly over the Himalayas.

    Our world is rapidly changing, and one could understand why some take a negative attitude toward it. Animals are going extinct, climate change is destroying some of our most beautiful places, and humans never quite figured out how to get along with one another.

    But the final paragraphs of The Language of Butterflies offer words of wisdom that I believe can give us hope through all of this:

    “When a five-year-old girl releases a butterfly into the air, and when that butterfly is seen by other people as it flies to its winter destination, that, to my mind, is the real butterfly effect: the joining together of countless people of many different nations, across generations, in a united effort to protect at least one small joyful piece of the natural world to which we belong.”

    We can still work together to protect our beauty, our joy, and the people we love. Thank you, Wendy Williams. You are an author I have admired for a long time, and you have written a memoir that reminds us of this great truth.

    If you enjoyed this conversation about butterflies and the marvels of nature, thank you for reading. I’d appreciate it if you would consider buying me a coffee to support my continued reading and research.

    However, if you’re unable to contribute, I appreciate your fluttering in to spend a little of your time with me!

  • The Correspondent: The Book That Made Me Think Differently About Sight

    The Correspondent: The Book That Made Me Think Differently About Sight


    One of the greatest fears in my life is that I will one day, in my old age, lose the gift of sight. Without my sight, I would lose the sacred thing that gives my life most meaning.

    If I could no longer read books, if I couldn’t see hallowed words on pages, what would become of the impressive personal library I have spent so much of my life building?

    I could not even think of passing it down, because no one I know loves my collection of books quite as much as I do.

    But, as much as these deeper themes resonate with me, the book is not about me. It’s about a popular novel called The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

    In The Correspondent, the protagonist is a seventy-three-year-old retired lawyer named Sybil Van Antwerp. Her story in this novel is told through letters she sends and receives. She is faithful in this habit: every morning she sits at her desk and writes missives to friends, family, and even authors she admires, such as Ann Patchett and Joan Didion.

    The first time Sybil experiences a loss of vision, the description is terrifying:

    I couldn’t see! But how? That stretch of time, was it a moment or was it minutes? It was as if my life was a movie and went black, meant it, but I’m not certain, and that’s what’s troubling me. I’m not certain it was my vision that went black. It was as if I’d closed my eyes; it’s as if the space of time has been deleted from my memory, up until I crashed.

    Sybil’s failing eyesight leaves her vulnerable to dark memories of a tragedy that took place long ago, when one of her sons tragically died. Writing, the great comforter, forces her to confront a profound sense of guilt that, like a monster, has peered over her shoulder ever since.

    Terrible accidents happen all the time to many, many people. The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?

    Writing has an ability to calm a storm. It will not undo the grief that is “large as the sun,” but when words and stories are turned to truth and trust, they help certain scars to heal.

    The process of sorting through our stories can be painful at first, but sometimes it is the only way to understand what they have done to us.

    Sybil’s fear of going blind intensifies:

    What has my life been, really? I’ll go blind, and then? I wonder — the letters. All the letters. I wonder if all of it was a waste. Pages and pages of letters. I wonder what has it all been, really. I’ll go blind, and they will be nothing to me. It will be as if they aren’t there, and does that mean, in a way, they were never there?

    And then, as the novel nears its end, her tone changes:

    I thought when I started to lose my sight in this way, when it actually began to slip away, I would cling to it with all my might, but that isn’t the way I feel now. Now that it’s become such a strain, I almost find myself ready to let it go.

    What appears on the surface to be a melancholy admission is truly far more than that. Sybil is conceding that, even without the ability to see book pages and mountains and butterflies gliding in pairs, life goes on.

    There is more to the experience of living out our own stories. And while I still live in dread that I could one day wind up blind, it does help to witness Sybil’s struggle — and realize that, while she is tired from it all, she is not defeated.

    Migraines aren’t new foes in literature.

    In this post, we discussed the character of Marilla Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables. In Montgomery’s first Anne book, Marilla is seen frequently struggling with debilitating migraines which make it difficult for her to go about her day and manage her many household chores.

    In Chapters 37 and 38, she finally consents to see a doctor, in the hopes that he might provide some relief. The news is bleak: her headaches are caused by a progressive condition which threatens her vision.

    Knowing that Marilla is vulnerable and cannot manage things on her own, Anne makes a sacrifice for her — a touching scene when we recall all that Marilla has done for her.

    But Marilla is still fearful.

    Marilla expresses panic when she is given the diagnosis:

    “If I wear the glasses he’s given me and give up all reading and sewing and fine work of any kind — if I keep out of the twilight and don’t cry on any account — my eyes may not get any worse and my headaches will be cured. But if I don’t, the doctor says I’ll certainly be stone-blind in six months.”

    She then mourns all that she will have lost:

    “To think of me sitting here tied hand and foot and completely helpless!… My eyes have always been so good. I can’t read, nor sew, nor do anything in the twilight. I’d rather be blind altogether than just sitting around doing nothing.”

    Sybil and Marilla might not have had the same disease, but they are remarkably similar in this respect. Their panic echoes one another, except that Marilla has Anne to help her through the dark days, while Sybil is, by choice, alone.

    Humans have always lived in fear of darkness, of the inability to perceive beauty when standing in front of it. Books offer us perspective and — dare I say it? — peace. Even if we do face the trial of blindness, medicine has evolved, and we do not need to bear the burden alone.

    More importantly, there are so many different ways to hear and tell a story. We may lose our ability to see the words on a page, but that does not mean the story — or the beauty that first drew us to it — has disappeared.

    Perhaps that is one of the comforts of being human: the things we love continue to live in us, even when we can no longer experience them in quite the same way.

    Keep the Tearoom Brewing ☕

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    Your contribution helps me keep buying books, talking with authors, writing about women and literature, and making this corner of the internet a little more interesting.

    Every coffee helps—and every reader means even more to me.

  • Why You Keep DNF’ing Books

    Why You Keep DNF’ing Books


    Literature gives us so many different paths to take: adventures that would never have been possible in our own lives, and lessons we might never have learned in quite the same way.

    Those of us who cannot imagine life without books know that a shelf full of them can be a source of comfort all by itself. Even when we aren’t reading everything we’ve purchased, there is something reassuring about knowing that those books are waiting for us. And yet, every reader has gone through seasons when none of the books we reach for seem to hold us.

    It is the old dilemma of “I have nothing to read!” when, in fact, we have hundreds of books waiting on our shelves. It is the purgatory of reaching for bestseller after bestseller, skimming the opening chapter, and setting it aside with a resigned sigh. Eventually, you may begin to wonder whether you even enjoy reading anymore. Surely there must be something wrong when the book everyone else loves leaves you completely cold.

    But there are many reasons we might keep putting down books we expected to love. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, particularly during those periods when I felt guilty for abandoning books I desperately wanted to enjoy. Sometimes, no matter how beloved a book is or how much you want to love it, you simply cannot turn another page.

    Perhaps you’ve found this article at precisely the moment you needed it. If you’re in the middle of a reading dry spell, I hope some of what follows will make it feel a little less troubling. Because I promise: this will pass. Eventually, you’ll pick up a book that meets you at exactly the right moment and wonder why you ever felt guilty for putting the others down.

    Tiredness of the Mind

    It’s tempting to believe that our minds are somehow above such weaknesses as might make it difficult to complete a novel. Are books not supposed to transport us to places beyond imagination?

    But the truth is that reading—truly reading, in order to comprehend and remember—requires a complete engagement of the mind.

    Much of the time, it isn’t the fault of the novel itself that you aren’t being pulled into it. The most gripping story ever written will be little more than mist if a reader lacks the mental bandwidth to comprehend what it is trying to do.

    And no, drinking more coffee isn’t necessarily the solution. It may give you an adrenaline rush, but for most people, good reading is slow reading. We can skim our way through a novel, but will we remember any of it by the time we reach the final page?

    If your mind is too tired to enjoy books the way it once did, there are a few things you can try before deciding that you’ve lost your love of reading altogether. They may prepare you to enjoy your next book without suspecting that you are doing it an injustice—or wasting your own time.

    • Put the phone away. Give yourself even twenty or thirty minutes without notifications, scrolling, or the temptation to check what you’ve missed. A mind accustomed to constant stimulation may need a little quiet before it can settle into a novel.
    • Take a walk. Reading doesn’t always begin when you open the book. A short walk can give your mind somewhere else to wander for a while, leaving you more capable of settling into someone else’s imagined world afterward.
    • Do something with your hands. Make tea, water your plants, sketch, tidy a small corner of your room—anything that doesn’t demand much intellectual effort. Sometimes the best preparation for reading is giving your mind permission to stop working so hard.
    • Read less. If you’re exhausted, there is no virtue in forcing yourself through fifty pages when ten would be enough. Read a chapter. Read a few pages. Read a poem instead. You aren’t failing at reading because you lack the energy to consume a novel at the pace you expected of yourself.

    Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for our reading life is to stop demanding that our tired minds over-perform. Our books will still be there when we are ready for them.

    Sometimes, Breaks Are Good

    I know it sounds like sacrilege for a book creature like me to suggest that it might be good to take a break. But it is possible to take your TBR list so seriously that it begins to feel less like a source of pleasure and more like another chore.

    If reading a book becomes akin to doing the dishes or mowing the lawn, of course some of us will begin to dread the time that we have set aside for it.

    I can think of at least two reading dry spells that have punctuated my life. The most recent occurred when my paternal grandmother died. Words cannot describe how much her death unsettled me, making even the things I loved most seem to lose their luster. I read very few books during that time, but I remember two of the handful that did guide me through it: Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy and The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt.

    As an aside: if you can remember two novels from a difficult time that made your trials more bearable, you may have identified part of your lifetime literary canon. When you are old and necessarily selective about the books you spend your final years with, these might be the ones you’ll gravitate toward naturally.

    Marilla of Green Gables will be a comfort to me when I am seventy-six and my eyesight begins to fail me. It has become an old friend. If you have books that have taken on the same significance for you, cherish them. And please tell me about them in the comments. I would love to know their titles, and why they are close to your heart.

    In my experience, by the end of these reading slumps, it felt as if a dam had broken. All of a sudden, I would find myself in a bookstore, not knowing where to begin and not having the slightest desire to stop. I was fascinated by every cover and every blurb, ready to spend the next few months exploring the worlds waiting between the covers.

    Perhaps that is what we forget when we are in a reading slump: the desire to read can return. We don’t have to force it back. Sometimes we simply have to give it room to find us.

    Let Yourself Be a Reader

    Perhaps the most important thing to remember when you find yourself abandoning book after book is that you are not required to prove that you are a reader.

    You do not have to finish every book you begin. You do not have to enjoy the books everyone else is talking about. You do not have to keep reading a novel because you think you ought to be. And you certainly don’t have to turn something that once brought you pleasure into another task on your list.

    Sometimes you are tired. Sometimes you are distracted. Sometimes life has become too loud for the concentration that a good novel requires. And sometimes, quite simply, the book’s not right for you.

    There will be other books.

    That, to me, is one of the great consolations of being a lifelong reader. There is always another shelf, another bookstore, another library somewhere. A reading slump may feel strangely permanent while you’re in the midst of it, but it’s not.

    Your next beloved book may already be sitting unread on your shelf.

    Some books will come at the right time. For me, Marilla of Green Gables was one of those books.

    I found my way to it during one of the most difficult periods of my life, when I had little appetite for reading at all. It reminded me that sometimes we don’t need to force ourselves back into reading; we simply need to stumble upon the right book at the right time. You can read my full review of Marilla of Green Gables here.

    So put the book down if you need to. Take a walk. Make tea and let your mind wander. Read something completely different—or don’t read anything for a little while.

    When you are ready, open a book again. I have a feeling you’ll know the right one when you find it.

    Cover Image: The Bibliophile (1896), Johann Hamza

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