Doris Lessing’s Centenary & The Grass Is Singing
Today would have been Doris Lessing’s 100th birthday; she in fact died in 2013. Reading Lara Feigel’s Free Woman last year encouraged me to try more from Lessing, and I’m glad that I did so this month. I started with The Fifth Child, a horror novella for R.I.P., followed by the novel Lessing brought with her when she left Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for England.
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Doris Lessing at Cologne Literature Festival, 2006. Elke Wetzig / Juan Pablo Arancibia Medina [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D.
The Grass Is Singing (1950)
I had trouble believing that this novel a) was Lessing’s debut and b) is now nearly 70 years old. It felt both fresh and timeless, and I could see how it has inspired writing about the white experience in Africa ever since, especially a book like Fiona Melrose’s Midwinter, in which an English farmer and his son are haunted by the violent death of the young man’s mother back in Zambia 10 years ago.
For The Grass Is Singing begins with two sly words, “MURDER MYSTERY”: a newspaper headline announcing that Mary, wife of Rhodesian farmer Dick Turner, has been found murdered by their houseboy. It’s a tease because in one sense there’s no mystery to this at all: we know from the first lines what happened to Mary. And yet we are drawn in, wondering why she was killed and how the Turners went from an idealistic young couple enthusiastic about their various money-making schemes – a shop, chickens, tobacco – to a jaded, distant pair struggling for their health, both mental and physical.
The breakdown of their marriage and the failure of their farm form a dual tragedy that Lessing explores in searing psychological detail, all while exposing (with neither judgment nor approval) how Anglos felt about the natives at that time.
There’s a sense in which this was all fated: Dick is weak, someone Mary pities rather than loves and respects; and Mary’s mixed-up feelings toward her black servants – fear, contempt, curiosity and attraction – were bound to lead to an explosion. The land itself seems to be conspiring against them, too, or is at least indifferent to their plans and dreams.
So many passages struck me for their effortless profundity. I cringed to see myself so clearly in Mary’s boredom and restlessness, along with her ambivalence about the idea of motherhood: “She hated the idea of a baby, when she thought of its helplessness, its dependence, the mess, the worry. But it would give her something to do.”
This was the fifth full-length book I’ve read by Lessing, and by far the best.
My rating: 
Alas, I had a Lessing DNF this month, too:
The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
This was shelved in with the memoirs in The Bookshop, Wigtown. I’m not blaming Mr. Bythell or his staff, as this would be a very easy shelving error to make, even for those well versed in literature. But I was disappointed to realize that it’s actually one of Lessing’s detached, dreamy dystopian novels. I tried really hard with this but couldn’t make it past page 48. There’s just not much detail to latch onto. You know that it is set in a vague but believable near future (London?) in which there has been political and social breakdown, followed by gangs, looting and fighting. The narrator hides out in her apartment and is able to live a fairly normal life (“We can get used to anything at all”), at least until an adolescent girl named Emily Cartright is deposited into her care. The novel still feels relevant – the comments on rumor and gossip being as important as news; the sense that the narrator’s generation has ruined things for Emily’s generation and should accept guilt and responsibility – but there is just no plot to speak of.
Next up for me from Lessing’s works will be at least one of her heavily autobiographical Martha Quest novels.
Best Nonfiction Books of 2018
Below I’ve chosen my 12 favorite nonfiction books published in 2018. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that half of them have a medical theme. Many have already featured on my blog in some way over the course of the year. To keep things simple, as I’ve done in previous years, I’m limiting myself to two sentences per title: a potted summary plus why you should read it. Let the countdown begin!
12. The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú: Francisco Cantú was a U.S. Border Patrol agent for four years in Arizona and Texas. Impressionistic rather than journalistic, his book is a loosely thematic scrapbook that, in giving faces to an abstract struggle, argues passionately that people should not be divided by walls but united in common humanity.
11. Bookworm by Lucy Mangan: Mangan takes us along on a nostalgic chronological tour through the books she loved most as a child and adolescent. No matter how much or how little of your early reading overlaps with hers, you’ll appreciate her picture of the intensity of children’s relationship with books – they can completely shut out the world and devour their favorite stories over and over, almost living inside them, they love and believe in them so much – and her tongue-in-cheek responses to them upon rereading them decades later.
10. Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler: An assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, Bowler was fascinated by the idea that you can claim God’s blessings, financial and otherwise, as a reward for righteous behavior and generosity to the church (“the prosperity gospel”), but if she’d been tempted to set store by this notion, that certainty was permanently fractured when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in her mid-thirties. Bowler writes tenderly about suffering and surrender, about living in the moment with her husband and son while being uncertain of the future.
9. Gross Anatomy by Mara Altman: Through a snappy blend of personal anecdotes and intensive research, Altman exposes the cultural expectations that make us dislike our bodies, suggesting that a better knowledge of anatomy might help us feel normal. It’s funny, it’s feminist, and it’s a cracking good read.
8. The Unmapped Mind by Christian Donlan: Donlan, a Brighton-area video games journalist, was diagnosed with (relapsing, remitting) multiple sclerosis in 2014; he approaches his disease with good humor and curiosity, using metaphors of maps to depict himself as an explorer into uncharted territory. This is some of the best medical writing from a layman’s perspective I’ve ever read.
7. Skybound by Rebecca Loncraine: For Rebecca Loncraine, after treatment for breast cancer in her early thirties, taking flying lessons in an unpowered glider (everywhere from Wales to Nepal) was a way of rediscovering joy and experiencing freedom by facing her fears in the sky. Each year seems to bring one exquisite posthumous memoir about facing death with dignity; this is a worthwhile successor to When Breath Becomes Air et al.
6. Face to Face by Jim McCaul: Eighty percent of a facial surgeon’s work is the removal of face, mouth and neck tumors in surgeries lasting eight hours or more; McCaul also restores patients’ appearance as much as possible after disfiguring accidents. This is a book that inspires wonder at all that modern medicine can achieve.
5. That Was When People Started to Worry by Nancy Tucker: Tucker interviewed 70 women aged 16 to 25 for a total of more than 100 hours and chose to anonymize their stories by creating seven composite characters who represent various mental illnesses: depression, bipolar disorder, self-harm, anxiety, eating disorders, PTSD and borderline personality disorder. Reading this has helped me to understand friends’ and acquaintances’ behavior; I’ll keep it on the shelf as an invaluable reference book in the years to come.
4. Free Woman by Lara Feigel: A familiarity with the works of Doris Lessing is not a prerequisite to enjoying this richly satisfying hybrid of biography, literary criticism and memoir. Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is about the ways in which women compartmentalize their lives and the struggle to bring various strands into harmony; that’s what Free Woman is all about as well.
3. Implosion by Elizabeth W. Garber: The author endured sexual and psychological abuse while growing up in a glass house designed by her father, Modernist architect Woodie Garber – a fascinating, flawed figure – outside Cincinnati in the 1960s to 1970s. This is definitely not a boring tome just for architecture buffs; it’s a masterful memoir for everyone.
2. Educated by Tara Westover: Westover writes with calm authority, channeling the style of the scriptures and history books that were formative in her upbringing and education as she tells of a young woman’s off-grid upbringing in Idaho and the hard work that took her from almost complete ignorance to a Cambridge PhD. This is one of the most powerful and well-written memoirs I’ve ever read.
It was a real toss-up between Westover and this one, but since Educated has already gotten a ton of attention this year, I’ve awarded the title of nonfiction book of the year to:
1. Under the Rock by Benjamin Myers: A spell-bindingly lyrical book that ranges from literature and geology to true crime but has an underlying autobiographical vein. Its every sentence is well-crafted and memorable; this isn’t old-style nature writing in search of unspoiled places, but part of a growing interest in the ‘edgelands’ where human impact is undeniable but nature is creeping back in.
My 2018 nonfiction books of the year (the ones I own in print, anyway).
What were some of your top nonfiction reads of the year?
Upcoming posts:
27th: Best fiction of the year
28th: Runners-up
29th: Best backlist reads
30th: Other superlatives and some early 2019 recommendations
31st: Library Checkout & Final statistics on my 2018 reading
Frieda by Annabel Abbs: A Sideways Look at D.H. Lawrence
Possibly never before nor since has a great writer been so intensely and so permanently influenced by one woman as Lawrence was by Frieda von Richtofen.
~biographer Robert Lucas
I have a weakness for “famous wives” books, which have become increasingly popular over the past decade. (I have a whole shelf for them on Goodreads.) Frieda particularly appealed to me because of the reading I’ve done around the life of D.H. Lawrence. In my sophomore year of college I took a course on Yeats & Lawrence and found Lawrence fascinating almost in spite of myself. I remember bursting out in one early seminar on Sons and Lovers, “but he sexualizes everything!” The more I read, though, the more I admired his grasping for the fullness of life, which at least starts with the body.
After my study abroad year I did independent travel in Dorset and around Nottingham to explore the sense of place in Thomas Hardy and Lawrence’s works, and when I applied for graduate school scholarships I was undecided whether to focus on the Victorians or Lawrence and the Moderns (I eventually settled on the former). I also adapted a paper I’d written about D.H. Lawrence’s new moral framework for sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and presented it at the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America’s 2005 conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The conference included a wonderful trip out to Lawrence’s ranch at Taos.
All this explains why I was so keen to see how Annabel Abbs would depict Frieda, who came from disgraced German aristocracy and left her first husband, Ernest Weekley, a linguistics professor at Nottingham, and their three children to be with Lawrence. If you rely only on the words of Lawrence himself, you’d think Frieda was lucky to shed her dull family life and embark on an exciting set of bohemian travels with him as he built his name as a writer.
Abbs adds nuance to that picture by revealing just how much Frieda was giving up, and the sorrow she left behind her. Much of the book is in third person limited from Frieda’s point of view, but there are also occasional chapters from the perspectives of Ernest and the children, mostly their son Monty, as they work through their confusion over Frieda’s actions and try to picture the future without her. I loved the way that these chapters employ dramatic irony, especially to create a believable child mindset. “I have realised there is something inside me struggling to come out,” Frieda says to Monty. “I call it the what-I-could-be.” Poor Monty, just seven years old when the book opens in 1907, thinks his mother must be talking literally about a baby on the way. When her inchoate longings finally center on Lawrence, Ernest’s working-class former student, in 1912, Monty describes the young man as a “hungry fox.”
Frieda’s relationship with Lawrence, whom she called “Lorenzo,” lasted nearly two decades but was undeniably volatile. Abbs refuses to romanticize it: the early days of frolicking naked in meadows and weaving flowers through each other’s pubic hair soon cede to incidents of jealousy and disturbing cruelty. Lawrence pressed her into remarrying though she was happier living outside of convention. We can sympathize with the passion and deep communion she found with Lawrence –
“She was conscious, in that moment, that their minds had met and crossed and understood. That this miner’s son – so strange and unknown, so young – was more like her than anyone she’d ever met.”
“She felt as if she had been split open, as if Mr Lawrence had peered deep inside her, seen things she had hidden from the rest of the world. It was a marvellous feeling, she decided, to be explored and understood.”
– but also with the later suspicion that she’s given up so much – social acceptability and years of life with her children – and perhaps in some ways it hasn’t been worth it. “He could be so infuriating! So exhausting! But his vitality, the sharp light in which he saw everything, his wild poetic fury, they made her feel as if she could breathe again.”
Frieda is particularly reminiscent of Loving Frank, Nancy Horan’s novel about Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s affair with architect Frank Lloyd Wright: she left her children in pursuit of love and independence and spent time traveling, including in Germany, where she absorbed notions of free love and women’s rights – just as Frieda did. I was also reminded of Free Woman, Lara Feigel’s book on Doris Lessing, who gave up her children to pursue her writing. In Lessing’s case there was not the same wrenching regret. Still, all three books offer a valuable look at the choices women make when love, duty and vocation don’t align.
The Australian cover.
My knowledge of Lawrence’s writings and biography enhanced my enjoyment of this novel. I’ve appreciated for the first time just how much Frieda inspired the female protagonists in Lawrence’s major works. In a comprehensive Historical note and Author’s note, Abbs lists her sources and explains the small tweaks she made to the historical record to fit the story line. However, you don’t need any prior knowledge to fall in love with Frieda’s vivacity. Her determination to live according to her own rules makes her a captivating character.
My rating: 
Frieda was published by Two Roads on November 15th. With thanks to the publisher for the proof copy for review.
The Best Books from the First Half of 2018
Here’s a quick look back at a baker’s dozen of 2018 releases that have stood out most for me so far. I’ve linked to books that I’ve already reviewed in full on the blog or elsewhere.
Fiction:
The Only Story by Julian Barnes: A familiar story: a May–December romance fizzles out. A sad story: an idealistic young man who swears he’ll never be old and boring has to face that this romance isn’t all he wanted it to be. A love story nonetheless. Paul met 48-year-old Susan, a married mother of two, at the local tennis club when he was 19. The narrative is partly the older Paul’s way of salvaging what happy memories he can, but also partly an extended self-defense. Barnes takes what could have been a dreary and repetitive story line and makes it an exquisitely plangent progression: first-person into second-person into third-person. The picture of romantic youth shading into cynical but still hopeful middle age really resonates, as do the themes of unconventionality, memory, addiction and pity.
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin: Summer 1969: four young siblings escape a sweltering New York City morning by visiting a fortune teller who can tell you the day you’ll die. In the decades that follow, they have to decide what to do with this advance knowledge: will it spur them to live courageous lives, or drive them to desperation? This compelling family story lives up to the hype. Imagine the fun Benjamin had researching four distinct worlds: Daniel, a military doctor, examines Iraq War recruits; Klara becomes a magician in Las Vegas; Varya researches aging via primate studies; and Simon is a dancer in San Francisco. The settings, time periods, and career paths are so diverse that you get four novels’ worth of interesting background.
Florida by Lauren Groff: Two major, connected threads in this superb story collection are ambivalence about Florida, and ambivalence about motherhood. There’s an oppressive atmosphere throughout, with environmental catastrophe an underlying threat. Set-ups vary in scope from almost the whole span of a life to one scene. A dearth of named characters emphasizes just how universal the scenarios and emotions are. Groff’s style is like a cross between Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and her unexpected turns of phrase jump off the page. A favorite was “Above and Below,” in which a woman slips into homelessness. Florida feels innovative and terrifyingly relevant. Any one of its stories is a bracing read; together they form a masterpiece.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti: Should one have children? Should I have children? No matter who’s asking the questions or in what context, you’re going to get the whole gamut of replies. Heti’s unnamed heroine consults a fortune teller and psychics, tosses coins and interprets her dreams as The Decision looms. Chance, inheritance, and choice vie for pride of place in this relentless, audacious inquiry into the purpose of a woman’s life. I marked out dozens of quotes that could have been downloaded directly from my head or copied from my e-mails and journal pages. The book encapsulates nearly every thought that has gone through my mind over the last decade as I’ve faced the intractable question of whether to have children. Heti has captured brilliantly what it’s like to be in this situation in this moment in time.
Orchid & the Wasp by Caoilinn Hughes: The action spans about nine years: a politically turbulent decade that opens with the Iraq War protests and closes with the Occupy movement in New York City. Gael Foess, our lovable antiheroine, is a trickster. She’s learned well her banker father’s lesson that money and skills don’t get distributed fairly in this life, so she’s going to do what she can to ensure that her loved ones succeed. Art, music, religion and health are major interlocking themes. The author is wonderfully adept at voices, and the book’s frenetic pace is well matched by the virtuosic use of language – wordplay, neologisms, and metaphors drawn from the arts and nature. Hughes is an exciting writer who has rightfully attracted a lot of buzz for her debut.
The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman: Charles “Pinch” Bavinsky is just an Italian teacher, though as a boy in Rome in the 1950s–60s he believed he would follow in the footsteps of his sculptor mother and his moderately famous father, Bear Bavinsky, who paints close-ups of body parts. We follow Pinch through the rest of his life, a sad one of estrangement, loss and misunderstandings – but ultimately there’s a sly triumph in store for the boy who was told that he’d never make it as an artist. Rachman jets between lots of different places – Rome, New York City, Toronto, rural France, London – and ropes in quirky characters in the search for an identity and a place to belong. This is a rewarding story about the desperation to please, or perhaps exceed, one’s parents, and the legacy of artists in a fickle market.
The ‘bests’ that I happen to own in print.
Nonfiction:
The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú: Francisco Cantú was a U.S. Border Patrol agent for four years in Arizona and Texas. Impressionistic rather than journalistic, his book is a loosely thematic scrapbook. He inserts snippets of U.S.–Mexico history, including the establishment of the border, and quotes from other primary and secondary texts. He also adds in fragments of his family’s history: His ancestors left Mexico during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, but there’s no doubt his Latino name and features made him a friendly face for illegal immigrants. The final third of the book makes things personal when his friend is detained in Mexico. Giving faces to an abstract struggle, this work passionately argues that people should not be divided by walls but united in common humanity.
The Unmapped Mind by Christian Donlan: Some of the best medical writing from a layman’s perspective I’ve ever read. Donlan, a Brighton-area video games journalist, was diagnosed with (relapsing, remitting) multiple sclerosis in 2014. “I think sometimes that early MS is a sort of tasting menu of neurological disease,” Donlan wryly offers. He approaches his disease with good humor and curiosity, using metaphors of maps to depict himself as an explorer into uncharted territory. The accounts of going in for an MRI and a round of chemotherapy are excellent. Short interludes also give snippets from the history of MS and the science of neurology in general. What’s especially nice is how he sets up parallels with his daughter’s early years. My frontrunner for next year’s Wellcome Book Prize so far.
Free Woman by Lara Feigel: Doris Lessing lived by ideals of free love and Communism, but it came at the price of abandoning her children. Lara Feigel could identify with Lessing in some ways, and as she entered a rocky time in her mid-thirties – a miscarriage followed by IVF, which was a strain on her marriage; the death of a close friend; ongoing worry over how motherhood might affect her academic career – she set out to find what Lessing could teach her about how to be free. A familiarity with the works of Doris Lessing is not a prerequisite to enjoying this richly satisfying hybrid of biography, literary criticism and memoir. The Golden Notebook is about the ways in which women compartmentalize their lives and the struggle to bring various strands into harmony; that’s what Free Woman is all about as well.
Implosion by Elizabeth W. Garber: The author grew up in a glass house designed by her father, Modernist architect Woodie Garber, outside Cincinnati in the 1960s to 70s. This and Woodie’s other most notable design, Sander Hall, a controversial tower-style dorm at the University of Cincinnati that was later destroyed in a controlled explosion, serve as powerful metaphors for her dysfunctional family life. Woodie is such a fascinating, flawed figure. Garber endured sexual and psychological abuse yet likens him to Odysseus, the tragic hero of his own life. She connected with him over Le Corbusier’s designs, but it was impossible for a man born in the 1910s to understand his daughter’s generation. This definitely is not a boring tome just for architecture buffs. It’s a masterful memoir for everyone.
Skybound by Rebecca Loncraine: Each year seems to bring one exquisite posthumous memoir about facing death with dignity. For Rebecca Loncraine, after treatment for breast cancer in her early thirties, taking flying lessons in an unpowered glider was her way of rediscovering joy and experiencing freedom by facing her fears in the sky. She discovered a particular love for flying alongside birds: red kites in Wales, and vultures in Nepal. The most remarkable passages of the book are the exhilarating descriptions of being thousands of feet up in the air and the reflections on why humans are drawn to flight and what it does for our bodies and spirits. Loncraine had virtually finished this manuscript when her cancer returned; she underwent another 14 grueling months of treatment before her death in September 2016.
Bookworm by Lucy Mangan: Mangan takes us along on a nostalgic chronological tour through the books she loved most as a child and adolescent. No matter how much or how little of your early reading overlaps with hers, you’ll appreciate her picture of the intensity of children’s relationship with books – they can completely shut out the world and devour their favorite stories over and over, almost living inside them, they love and believe in them so much – and her tongue-in-cheek responses to them upon rereading them decades later. There are so many witty lines that it doesn’t really matter whether you give a fig about the particular titles she discusses or not. A delightful paean to the joys of being a lifelong reader; recommended to bibliophiles and parents trying to make bookworms out of their children.
Educated by Tara Westover: This is one of the most powerful and well-written memoirs I’ve ever read. It tells of a young woman’s off-grid upbringing in Idaho and the hard work that took her from almost complete ignorance to a Cambridge PhD. Westover’s is an incredible story about testing the limits of perseverance and sanity. Her father may have been a survivalist, but her psychic survival is the most impressive outcome here. What takes this astonishing life story to the next level, making it a classic to sit alongside memoirs by Alexandra Fuller, Mary Karr and Jeannette Walls, is the writing. Westover writes with calm authority, channeling the style of the scriptures and history books that were formative in her upbringing and education.
What are some of the best books you’ve read so far this year?
What 2018 releases do I need to catch up on right away?
Two Memoirs of Women’s Freedom: Lara Feigel and Rebecca Loncraine
I have read some truly phenomenal memoirs this year, most of them by women. These two have rather different starting points – frustration with the constraints of marriage and motherhood, and breast cancer treatment – but I’ve paired them because both are journeys of self-discovery in which the author commits to determining how to live a free and true life.
Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing by Lara Feigel
It started with a spate of weddings one summer. Lara Feigel, a literature lecturer at King’s College London, found herself strangely irked at all this capitulation to marital convention, even though she herself had married in her twenties and had a young son. What did her mild outrage signify? At the same time, she was rereading the works of Doris Lessing, whom she found simultaneously admirable and vexing: Lessing lived by her ideals of free love and Communism, but it came at the price of abandoning her children. Feigel could identify with Lessing in some ways but not in others, and as she entered a rocky time in her mid-thirties – a miscarriage followed by IVF, which was a strain on her marriage; the death of a close friend; and ongoing worry over how motherhood might affect her academic career – she set out to find what Lessing could teach her about how to be free.
Throughout, Feigel holds up her own experiences of marriage and motherhood in parallel to Lessing’s. She maintains a delicate balance between biographical and autobiographical information and brings in references to other writers – everyone from Rachel Cusk to D.H. Lawrence – to explore various opinions on maternal ambivalence and sexual fulfillment. I could relate to the bookworm’s impulse to turn to literature for comfort and direction – “the most enduring novelists … illuminate our lives,” and “we live differently as a result of reading them,” Feigel insists. Lessing seemed to her the perfect “writer to discover in your thirties; a writer who wrote about the lives of grown-up women with an honesty and fullness I had not found in any novelist before or since.”
And yet a familiarity with or fondness of the works of Doris Lessing is not a prerequisite to enjoying this book. I’ve only ever read The Golden Notebook (1962) and Alfred and Emily (2008), a fictionalized biography of Lessing’s parents, both during my mid-twenties. The former I almost certainly read before I could fully appreciate it. It’s about the ways in which women compartmentalize their lives and the struggle to bring various strands into harmony; that’s what Free Woman is all about as well. Feigel often looks for clues in Lessing’s heavily autobiographical Martha Quest novels, which I’d like to read, and also travels to California to meet one of Lessing’s lovers and to Zimbabwe to see the farm where Lessing grew up.
Like Samantha Ellis’s How to Be a Heroine and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, this is a richly satisfying hybrid of biography, literary criticism and memoir. I would also recommend it to readers of Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank, and Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. Feigel’s is a particularly brave and forthright book. I feel proud of her in an oddly personal way: during my years as a library assistant at King’s, I saw her chair countless literature and life writing events. She seemed impossibly young for a professor type, and wore her navy blue shift dress and string of pearls like it was her grown-up’s uniform. I can tell that the years since, including the difficult experiences she recounts here, have both softened and toughened her, sandpapering away what she calls her “diffident angularity” and replacing it with womanly wisdom.
My rating: 
Free Woman was published by Bloomsbury UK on March 8th. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
Skybound: A Journey in Flight by Rebecca Loncraine
In 2016 it was When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi; in 2017 it was The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs. And now Skybound. Each year seems to bring one exquisite posthumous memoir about facing a death from cancer with dignity. For Rebecca Loncraine, after treatment for breast cancer in her early thirties, taking flying lessons in an unpowered glider was her way of rediscovering joy and experiencing freedom by facing her fears in the sky.
She was a freelance writer based on her parents’ farm in the Black Mountains of Wales, an area that’s familiar to me from trips to Hay-on-Wye and from my reading of Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill. The history and geography of the region, as revealed from the air, weave through the book, as do childhood memories and recollections of chemotherapy. Loncraine discovered a particular love for flying alongside birds: the red kites in Wales, and later vultures in Nepal. The most remarkable passages of the book are the exhilarating descriptions of being thousands of feet up in the air and the reflections on why humans are drawn to flight and what it does for our bodies and spirits. She learned from a British Airways pilot that 500,000 people are airborne at any one moment! We take for granted what should still be acknowledged as a miraculous feat.
“There’s no road in the sky. Each individual glider pilot finds a new pathless way through the air, a unique scribble. We locate a bit of ridge lift, here; fly out to a thermal, there; we wind and manoeuvre over the curving land. We never take the same route twice, so flight offers me a new perspective each time I fly.”
“Influenced by the ancient seam of human thought that associates the sky with the imagination, weaving and circling in the sky begins to feel like sailing through the realm of the subconscious itself.”
This hobby-turned-obsession was not without its inconveniences and dangers. Even when it’s warm at ground level it’s frigid at 13,000 feet, so you have to bundle up. Meanwhile, the strength of the sun means you keep guzzling water and have to wear either a urine-collecting device or adult diapers. The earliest attempts at unpowered flight were generally fatal, and when Loncraine went to New Zealand for a bonus season of flying to replace the Welsh winter, one of her fellow flyers died in a crash. Her instructor told her she’d become fearless, even reckless. But when she met one of the pioneers of gliding, then in his nineties, in New Zealand he spoke an aphorism that perfectly captures the role flying played for Loncraine: “The antidote to fear is fascination.”
There’s a brief afterword by Loncraine’s mother, Trisha. Her daughter had virtually finished this manuscript when the cancer returned, and underwent another 14 grueling months of treatment before her death in September 2016. This is a simply wonderful book; what a shame that we won’t get another.
My rating: 
Skybound was published by Picador on April 19th. My thanks to the publisher for a proof copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. An American transplant to England, I'm a full-time freelance proofreader and book reviewer.