Seasonally, my reading is a little all over the place. On Saturday we had a full day of snow. On Sunday a full day of rain. On Monday we couldn’t open the back doors. The front door was protected, but the walkway and steps a solid sheet of ice: unusable. What’s left of the snow is hardened like cake fondant; fondant I can stand atop… for as long as it takes for science to decide in which direction I’ll start sliding. Today the temperature is heading for a high of six, then falling to minus six, and in between I’m reading.

So, I carry on with some winter books: including Kev Lambert’s Les sentiers de neige (2024), which opens shortly before the Christmas holidays, with Zoey unsure about holiday arrangements during a family split, against a backdrop of a stolen videogame). And I have finished a couple of love stories I picked up in February, but have barely begun Christina Stead’s For Love Alone. And I’ve started two spring reads, about which I’ll have more to say soon, but the bulk remain untouched.

The other day I was reading Ali’s thoughts on Dorothy Edwards’ Rhapsody and was struck by Dorothy Edwards’ suicide note:

“I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship, and even love, without gratitude and given nothing in return.”

It reminded me of the ending of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Chuka” in a recent issue of The New Yorker (which you can hear the author read here).

“For a long time afterward, I thought about her accusation, because it was an accusation, that I was not grateful to have been loved. What is this gratitude to look like? Is it to be a state of being, to live adrift in gratitude because a man loves you?”

The end of a life, the end of a story.

In choosing books in read in Valentine’s week, I had Bookish Beck’s project in mind (she has links to the eighth previous years in her ninth annual post here): books with ‘love’ or ‘heart’ in their titles.

Ruby Langford Ginibi’s memoir, Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988), seemed the perfect candidate. To suit the criterion, yes: only not for a happy satin-bow-wrapped ending.

As a Bundjalung woman’s personal story, this narrative reminded me of Bev Sellers’ 2015 memoir and Jesse Thistle’s 2019 memoirs (a Soda Creek/Xat’sull First Nations and a Métis writer, respectively): each of them tells their story in simplest terms, yet makes the narrative so engaging that it’s hard to set aside.

The book opens with a couple of pages that move us through her life, as though through a series of snapshots, beginning when she’s six years old and referencing her three marriages and eight children. Then—she is born. It’s a curious but effective way to tell the story, and I really enjoyed the attention paid to her younger years (which so many autobiographies cut short).

By the time she is a young woman, readers have a solid sense of Ruby Langford. So, when she writes about how her “generation at this time wandered around as if we were tribal but in fact living worse than the poorest of poor whites”, we really feel for her. It’s cutting to share her sense that “men loved you for a while and then more kids came along and the men drank and gambled and disappeared.”

Romantic love was not long-lasting. She writes: “One day they’d had enough and they just didn’t come back. It happened with Gordon and later it happened with peter, and my women friends all have similar stories.”

Motherhood was a challenge too, but more rewarding in the end. “But I was happy with my brood. I still wanted to write a book one day but I had a life to live first.” (These were the parts of the book that I found most moving, but I don’t want to spoil them…even though I realise it’s not a novel, and a peek at her Wikipedia page would reveal all the details I’m protecting.)

But she’s not only determined—she’s curious. She loves again. And, when her nesting brood gets smaller, her world gets bigger. “After the wedding, things were quiet for a while. Now that Jeff was the only one at hone, I had time to read the papers and find out what was going on in the world.” By that point, there has been a lot of struggling and a lot of sadness, but I loved the final quarter of the book, her awakening to the other parts of life she’d missed while she was wandering.

My other choice was Valerie Taylor’s 1957 novel Whisper Their Love (reprinted by Arsenal Pulp in their Little Sister’s queer classics series in 2006): a queer classic. There’s an excerpt on their website.

In an interview in the appendices (which also include some of the author’s poetry and an essay about how WTL fits with other lesbian romances/pulp fiction/classics), Taylor describes her process: writing from the beginning towards the end.

And, so, Taylor (actually a pen name for Velma Young) knew how this story would conclude: she was surprised by the controversy. All I can say without spoiling it, is that she wrote because she was weary of the men-writing-lesbians novels who got it all wrong, and her characters are credible from start-to-stop.

When the novel opens, Joyce Cameron is eighteen and she leaves Ferndale Illinois behind, to attend Louise Henderson Hicks Junior College. I was thinking about the new Mindy Kaling production. About the newer Kiley Reid novel, Come & Get It. We are fully on board with her sense of being torn about her mother’s pending remarriage, her sense of wanting relationships to work even though she recognised the deep fractures therein.

Then the story takes a hard turn that I would never have predicted. And, then, another. And one more. (Many of these matters still concern young women today.) She expected to have a lot of new experiences, but as the saying goes, she didn’t know what she didn’t know. Her own unknowingness is overwhelming. It went from being a book in my stack that I read in the evenings, to one read with caution. That surprised me, but that’s also the kind of emotional heft that ensures a story stays with me.

I wasn’t sure what to think about the ending, even after I’d finished reading the interview.

But, in the end, it’s gratitude which pulls Joyce towards her story’s conclusion.

All of it, all at the same time: somehow it makes sense.