‘Foster’ was first published as a short(er) short story in The New Yorker, and later expanded into its more recent published form.

I am a huge fan of the short story form, mainly for its ability to condense into few words, sentences and chapters so much emotion, meaning and relevance. ‘Foster’ is no exception.

It is the story of a young girl (unnamed) sent off to spend the summer in rural Ireland while her mother prepares to give birth to another child she doesn’t particularly want - just another mouth to feed.

The girl spends a few life changing weeks being seen, loved and appreciated. An experience at once frightening and unsettling:

‘…..and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.’

and along the way growing, changing, and realising how she is now,

"….in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be".

In just a few short chapters Claire Keegan beautifully expresses sentiments of loss and love, of what might have been but will never be. In a day and age of loud expression, this quiet and layered story also underlines the important distinction between what needs to be said and what truly doesn’t.

Thank you to my wonderful young Irish colleague, Aoife, for the recommendation!

PS ‘Foster’ is now also a film under the title ‘The Quiet Girl’ (An Cailín Ciúin in Irish)

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Memoirs are tricky. They often come from a place of pain or neglect, a life of struggle or one marred by loneliness and isolation.

So for a memoir to work, there needs to be distance between the author and the driving event, making space for the reader to empathize and relate. If there are too many unresolved issues, and it feels like the author is mid struggle, it makes it difficult for the reader to navigate and relate.

A few favorite memoirs that have succeeded in walking this fine line are ‘The Glass Castle’ by Jeannette Walls, ‘Educated’ by Tara Westover and - as will come as no surprise to readers of this page - almost anything by Edouard Louis!

Another such wonderful memoir is ‘Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, also known as the singer and guitarist of 'Japanese Breakfast’.

Zauner is the daughter of a Korean mother and an American father. After a childhood and youth spent mostly in opposition to her strict mother, she leaves home for college, (mentioning how the distance of this move was probably the saving grace of their relationship).

In her mid twenties as she leaves college her mother is diagnosed with cancer and Zauner spends the next few years taking care of her mother, traveling to Korea, connecting with her Korean culture - through family and food.

‘Crying in H Mart’ is a beautifully written, funny, moving tribute to a fraught mother - daughter relationship, the power of food and food culture, and a wonderful reminder that there is (almost) always hope for repair.

Happy Reading!

PS For Danish readers I would also like to recommend ‘Fruen’ by Malene Raben, also an extremely well written and successful memoir

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Reviewed by our very own Jenny :)

‘This book was a bit of a wild ride and I loved it, beside the somewhat unnecessary graphic description of the death of the family cat… that part I could have honestly just done without.

Although the story centres around a woman literally turning into a dog (not a spoiler, it’s literally in the description) this is essentially the story of a relatively new, inadequately supported mother, stretched beyond her means physically, mentally and emotionally.

Utterly exhausted and overwhelmed, she struggles with not only with the general day-to-day of 24/7 motherhood, but also the loss of her career in the arts after having their baby, and is a woman generally mourning the loss of her own sense of self. She is left alone every week by a pretty unsupportive husband who does little to nothing of benefit, even in the 48 hrs he returns to the family home on weekends… which is just enough time to dole out unsolicited and oversimplified advice on how to deal with things.

There’s so much more to this story than the woman’s Kafka-esque transformation into the dog, aka Nightbitch. The book took me a little by surprise by how much was tinged with sadness at the sheer desperation of exhaustion and the loss of one’s own identity as a woman beyond that of a mother after having children. The book has a lot for discussion on the problematic aspects of ‘traditional’ female/male gender roles.

Her transformative experience to ‘Nightbitch’ felt to me like something that was entirely and truly hers - something solitary and unconstrained by her identity as a mother or wife - a reawakening of her own empowerment through the literal embodiment of the character of Nightbitch, thus reigniting her lost passion and regaining her sense of self through “the transformative capacities of art”.

The focusing on the woman changing into the dog is actually just reductive - there’s so much more to discuss here.’

Happy Reading!

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In this stunner of a short debut novel - sparsely written in vignettes - the unnamed protagonist, a young black woman, finds success in all that she strives for. Making her way to the top of her London finance firm while on her way to a garden party at the home of her (white) boyfriend with his politically well connected parents and their old-money privilege, she reflects on a life recently and starkly contrasted by a cancer diagnosis.

Assembly is not only a poignant, thought-provoking account of what it means to be a black woman in Britain, it also draws an all important line to the strong legacy and heavy weight of British colonialism. No matter how well our protagonist does, how hard she works, how successful she is, it is never good enough.

'This is how I've been prepared. This is how we prepare ourselves, teach our children to approach this place of obstacle after obstacle. Work twice as hard. Be twice as good. And always, assimilate.'

As described in this slightly genre defying novel, it doesn’t matter how much success she achieves, be it in her personal life or at work, nothing escapes the assumptions people make on the basis of her skin colour.

'It's disorienting, prevents you from forming an identity. Living in a place you're forever told to leave, without knowing, without knowledge. Without history.'

Assembly is smart, painful, truthful and important. While it isn’t always possible to walk a mile in another person's shoes, here is an opportunity to understand and to hopefully become smarter about our own assumptions.

Happy Reading!

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