If you're going to borrow your friend's borrowed library books, make them these two

Sandwich and The Wedding People

I probably shouldn’t boast about cheating the library system, but I’m going to tell you this story anyway.

My neighbor, friend, and avid reader raved about a library book she read in a day. It was Sandwich by Catherine Newman, a book I’d also had on hold at the library. I was number one thousand (or at least I was behind many, many other people in line for the holds).

I had her borrowed copy of the book in my hands the next day.

I read Sandwich like I would eat a sleeve of Oreos, were I the person who would allow myself to eat a sleeve of Oreos. When I stopped reading, I wanted to go back for more, to get my fix. It felt like an addiction.

The next time I saw my neighbor she had just finished her library copy of The Wedding People, another book for which I was number one thousand at the library. I had that book in my hands before I finished Sandwich.

I had all these intentions of writing a reflection on The Remains of the Day for today’s post, but given that I can’t stop thinking about either of these library books I skipped the line for, I’m pivoting so that I can spend even more time thinking about them.

Sandwich by

Catherine Newman

Rocky’s body and brain being addled by menopause doesn’t stop her and her family from taking their annual trip to Cape Cod. She, her husband Nick, their adult kids Jamie and Willa, and Jamie’s girlfriend Maya spend one week together in the same quaint cabin they rent every year. It is glorious — Rocky has her children under her roof! The love she has for them is so potent it could kill her. They are perfect, despite their obvious imperfections. Rocky’s parents come, too, and she is appropriately wedged into her spot in the sandwich generation.

We spend the book on Cape Cod, both during the present summer and in summers past, when Rocky and Nick were deciding whether to have a third child. Decisions Rocky made in the past swell to the surface as she is confronted with upsetting truths about her family’s history. All this — and the book is funny. So funny that many times over, I laughed out loud. Once, I cried from laughing.

On that particular night, while my husband was in bed beside me reading his own book (Blue Sisters!) I laughed at a line. Then I laughed at another. Then another, and because it was nighttime and the kids were asleep and it wasn’t an appropriate time to crack up laughing, I cracked up laughing. I owed an explanation for the disruption to my husband, so I read him the scene where Rocky explains she and Nick both have plantar fasciitis, “a punishment for years of mocking all the special foot remedies in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue.” They now have a a stabilizer boot they share that they’ll wear to bed occasionally. Of the boot, Rocky says:

I picture an extraterrestrial squinting down at us from space, pointing to our strappy plastic sleep boot. What the hell is that? Then again, I picture them peering at the Lycra-wrapped people staggering across a CrossFit gym with car tires roped around their waists. What the hell are those?

Done justifying the cause of my laughter, I dove back into Rocky’s family. The novel wrapped everything up neatly but not too neatly, and it evoked more tears, and this time, I wasn’t laughing. I see people say all the time that a book made them laugh and cry. I almost never experience that, but Sandwich evoked all the emotions in me.

“Grief,” it reads, “was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.”

And, later:

You’re supposed to retrace your steps when you lose something, but none of my losses are like that. Where would I look for them? And what would I do if I found them? Little ghost babies, born babies, outgrown children’s bodies, missing teenagers. Loss like a shipwreck. Swim down to it, down, down, down to the pitch-black ocean floor, where nothing is visible and it never dissolves.

I was crushed when this book ended, both emotionally and because I didn’t want to be done with this world.

But: I had another library book on loan.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

The first chapter of this book didn’t seduce me quite like the first chapter of Sandwich did, but once I got my bearings straight — protagonist: Phoebe Stone; setting: Newport, Rhode Island; hook: Phoebe arrives at the Cornwall Inn to kill herself — I sunk straight to the core of this story.

So, Phoebe arrives at the enchanting Cornwall Inn to kill herself¹ because she has lost everything. Her husband has left her for his colleague, who happens to be Phoebe’s colleague, too, because they work at the same small university. Phoebe’s plans to end her life are interrupted by Lila, the meticulous bride whose six-day wedding is taking place at the very same inn Phoebe has landed. And when Lila finds out Phoebe’s intentions, she will not hear of them; not during her wedding week.

The Wedding People is hilarious in a different way than Sandwich. I didn’t laugh out loud but I laughed in my heart (does anybody remember the please scream inside your heart request from the Japanese amusement park during Covid?). The characters in this messy novel are flawed and therefore relatable. They are grieving, but they are also learning how to live new lives. As funny as the novel is, it’s equally as touching, with strangers braiding together, sometimes in ill-fitting ways, to form relationships.

I stayed up until 11:15 PM finishing this novel; three hours straight of this book, and when it was done, even though I was tired and my eyes were heavy, I could not fall asleep. I was alight with thoughts about what will happen now, after the conclusion of the book; where these characters will go. I fell asleep thinking about it. I woke up thinking about it.

I likely wouldn’t have read The Wedding People immediately after Sandwich if the books were not lent to me by a friend who had borrowed them from the library. (I wasn’t about to let her receive overdue notices.) But the way it played out was exactly what I needed. And maybe you need it, too. Maybe you want to experience the back-to-back confusion of laughing and crying and laughing and crying. If so, now you know what to read.

What are you reading? Have you read either of these books? What did you think of them?

What I’m reading: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Love,

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1. This might sound frank or candid to you. It did to me at first, too. But in the book, it was just a fact: Phoebe was going to kill herself. There were no overly sentimental ways of expressing what her intentions were, and so I decided to keep the same wording as Alison Espach used in The Wedding People.