Yesterday I finished reading my friend Pamela Petro’s new memoir The Long Field (now available from the U.K.). Pamela was one of the first writers to contact me - a letter written on a typewriter that began "Dear Mr. Swick" - after I became the travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel. Over the next 19 years I published everything she sent me: a story about dogsledding, one about staying in a lighthouse, one about running out of money in Portugal (and how at that moment the trip took on meaning), one about remarkable religious statuary in Brazil. They were all wonderful - marked by Pamela's incisive eye, restless intellect, and unquenchable fascination with the world - but the one that stood out for me was the one she wrote about a summer in Wales spent studying Welsh. She had developed a strong bond to the country that came through clearly in every sentence.
Her brilliant new memoir is about this bond and so much more. Centering on the Welsh word hiraeth - a kind of yearning that transcends homesickness, and is not confined to place - Pamela explores the ideas of home, loss, love, family, and sexuality. I came away from it not just in awe of her ability to seamlessly weave all these themes into a rich and moving narrative, but with something much deeper: a new view of the world and my place in it.
Every Sunday the New York Times Book Review interviews an author about his or her reading habits. The key word is ‘author;’ sometimes the interviewee, rather than a writer, is a celebrity (usually an entertainer of some sort) who has written a book but would never be described as bookish. Loretta Lynn’s answer to pretty much every question – last great book read, best book received as a gift – was “the Bible.”
This past Sunday the featured author was the actress Gabrielle Union. One of the questions asked her to name a book that was “disappointing, overrated, just not good.” Most writers dodge this one, or mention a weighty tome that has defeated many readers. Not Ms. Union. “The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, you can keep it,” she said. “Slaughterhouse-Five, keep it. White Fang, The Old Man and the Sea, Moby-Dick – please, keep it. My life did not change for reading any of those. If I didn’t have to write papers and do assignments on them, I would’ve gladly never finished them after the first chapter.”
Reading that, I wondered why the Book Review insists on interviewing non-readers about their reading habits. It only embarrasses them, which can’t be the editors’ intention. Can it?
Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review featured the review of a memoir, Ladyparts, in which each chapter is about a different part of the body. It reminded me a little of my memoir, in which each chapter takes place in a different part of the world. But my memoir has yet to find a publisher.
In tomorrow's Wall Street Journal I write about five great travel books: https://www.wsj.com/articles/five-best-books-by-travelers-in-residence-11628261021.
The other day at Big Apple, the secondhand bookstore on Federal Highway, I came across a copy of Helen Muir’s memoir, Baby Grace Sees the Cow. I got to know Helen, author of Miami, U.S.A., in her later years when we both attended Trinity Cathedral. Toward the end of the memoir she complains of elderly friends who go on and on about their ailments, monologues she and her husband called “organ recitals.”