March Issue of Sharing Jan’s Love Newsletter

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Read: March 2023

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Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

by Margaret Atwood

Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood is a collection of remarkable tales, which delight, illuminate, and are quietly devastating. I especially found the stories about Nell and Tig compelling and engaging. Widow describes a letter Nell almost wrote to a friend after Tig is gone. Nell sounded like me when she said, “the warping or folding of time. In some parts of this refolded time, Tig still exists, as much as he ever did.”

The letter Nell is writing to a friend she will never be sent because it speaks to the harsh reality that grief imposes upon us.

Margaret Atwood writes as Nell,

Have I gone into the dark tunnel, dressed in mourning black with gloves and a veil, and come out the other end, all cheery and wearing bright colors and loaded for bear?

No. Because it’s not a tunnel. There isn’t any other end. Time has ceased to be linear, with life events and memories in a chronological row, like beads on a string. It’s the strangest feeling, or experience, or rearrangement. I’m not sure I can explain it to you.

As much as it might have appeared that I was in a dark tunnel after Jan died, I was not and am not now. There is indeed no defined end to the grief journey.

We all must learn how to live without our loved ones. The pathway I have chosen may not work for anyone else.

The earlier Nell and Tig stories are memories about their lives, reminding me of how I wrote about how Jan and I met and eventually married.

I have always enjoyed reading Atwood‘s writing, including The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. I highly recommend Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood!

Old Babes in the Wood was my twenty-third book of the year and fulfilled my Goodreads 2023 Reading Challenge, but it will not end my reading this year.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the world’s most visionary and canonical authors. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories–some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine–explores the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit, and intellect.

The two brave sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the unbelievable, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love–and what comes after.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: December 2021

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Long Bright River

by Liz Moore

Long Bright River by Liz Moore was a 2020 NPR Books We Love Selection. It’s a contemporary novel about the opioid epidemic, it’s a novel about sisters and families, it’s a book about the police and how they fall short of the communities they serve, and it’s a well-plotted crime novel. Its main story revolves around Mickey, a patrol officer raising a young son in a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, and her missing sister, who’s addicted to drugs. Both women are the children of addicts, raised by a strict grandmother.

Despite Long Bright River being selected by NPR and others as one of the best books, I was not sure what to expect. My doubts evaporated on page one. Mickey’s narration, including her description of Kensignton, made this a page-turner.

Mickey and Kacey’s lives became so realistic that I could not put the book down. One night, I stayed up to finish reading for the first time in almost a decade.

As much as it focuses on the opioid epidemic and the shortcomings of policing, its proper focus is on sisters and families. My love of family has become more important to me than ever since the loss of Jan, the love of my life.

Ms. Moore brings it all together in the ending but leaves enough doubt as to the future relationship of the sisters that we can feel the harsh reality of life itself. Long Bright River is the first but not the last book by this author that I will read.

Goodreads has an overview if you need more convincing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don’t speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey’s district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit–and her sister–before it’s too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters’ childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.

I highly recommend this book.

Read: August 2023

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How to Love Your Daughter

by Hila Blum

I started reading a novel called “How to Love Your Daughter,” written by Hila Blum and translated by Daniella Zamir today. The book explores a complicated relationship between a mother and her grown daughter. It raises the question of how much harm we can do to our loved ones when love blinds us.

The story takes place thousands of miles away from home, where a woman finds herself peeking through well-lit windows at her two granddaughters. She has never met them before, as they are the daughters of her estranged daughter, whom she hasn’t seen in years.

The book’s central theme revolves around the woman’s attempt to understand how a once-loving relationship between her and her daughter ended up in such a distant and unfathomable state. The story shifts past and present as the woman unravels her memories and long-buried emotions. She tries to make sense of the seemingly insignificant moments of parental care that, combined, may have undermined what she valued most.

The author, Blum, skillfully delves into the complexities of family life, where a parent can easily cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even realizing it. The story leaves us wondering whether it’s possible ever to find our way back from such a point.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: May 2022

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Piranesi: A Novel by Susanna Clarke

by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is about a man known as Piranesi who lives in a big house and explores the labyrinth of rooms and hopes of understanding the meaning. Is it any surprise that I would pick this book as my thirtieth of the year? As a widow, I journal and journey in a life I did not expect to live, and I still believe I will find meaning and purpose.

In addition, a labyrinth is one of the options we have discussed for the next phase of the work in Hanson Park.

Piranesi is a page-turner, but that does not fully describe the beauty of the world that Susanna Clarke created. I highly recommend this book as it is one of my best this year.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

For readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.

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Read: March 2025

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Dream Count: A Novel

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today, I dove into “Dream Count” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I couldn’t be more excited! A decade in the making, this novel promises to be a captivating journey. Known for her bestselling works like “Americanah” and “We Should All Be Feminists,” Adichie brings her trademark brilliance to this story of four women exploring their loves, longings, and desires. I can’t wait to see how their lives unfold!

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. During the pandemic, feeling alone, she reflects on her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Her best friend Zikora, a successful lawyer, faces betrayal and heartbreak, leading her to turn to the person she thought she needed the least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold and outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she truly knows herself. Meanwhile, Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, proudly raises her daughter in America yet must confront an unimaginable hardship that threatens everything she has worked to achieve.

In “Dream Count,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie focuses on these women’s lives in a captivating and profound novel that explores the very nature of love. Is true happiness ever attainable, or is it merely a fleeting state? How honest must we be with ourselves to love and be loved? The story profoundly reflects on our choices and those made for us, mothers and daughters, and our interconnected world. “Dream Count” resonates with emotional urgency and provides poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, all conveyed in beautifully powerful language. This work reaffirms Adichie’s status as one of contemporary literature’s most exciting and dynamic writers.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels “Purple Hibiscus,” which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; “Half of a Yellow Sun,” which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection “The Thing Around Your Neck” and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book by Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

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Read: September 2019

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The Worst Hard Time

by Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan was initially a book I selected from the e-library because nothing else I wanted to read was available. Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down.

Now that we have had the warmest summer since 1936 during the dust bowl, the book has even more meaning.

According to The New York Times,

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect.”

With the likelihood of more ecological catastrophes in the immediate future, this is a book I highly recommend.

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March Issue of Sharing Jan’s Love Newsletter

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