Sandwich by Catherine Newman

The boat is full of children and bodies sleep on every available surface. It’s wonderful when the kids come home, but one downside of living on a boat (apart from having to pump out your poo every few weeks) is the lack of space. It reminds me of the parties my friends would throw in our late teens. One girl’s family was particularly forgiving of hordes of teenagers and some mornings there would be ten or twelve of us all cocooned in sleeping bags through the house. Threading your way through everyone to make tea or go and nurse your hangover somewhere more clinical was a skill that I never had much further use for until boat life came calling.

Jason is working in the bedroom so me and the cat have made an island of the dining table and are trying to take advantage of the quiet for a bit of contemplation and a lot of coffee.

I just finished reading Catherine Newman’s Sandwich. It kept cropping up in people’s summer reading lists and although I am the person least likely to rush out and buy any beach reads or top summer books or whatever the flavour of the month is, I felt compelled to grab it. I am so glad I did. It is perfect.

Rocky is in her fifties and dealing (or not) with menopause. The book takes place over a single week of the family holiday to Cape Cod, a place they have been coming to for twenty years. The familiar routines and beloved people come up against the unfamiliar feelings of the menopause, sending cracks through the family fault lines.

This could be so bleak but it is far from it. Newman writes with perfect clarity, great economy and a lightness of touch that I could only marvel at. It is, at times, hilarious and at others will stop you in your tracks with a jab to the guts. I properly laughed at the episode when they go to the local book sale:

‘In Self-Help, I flip to the index in a suspiciously slim book about menopause. There is no “vaginal atrophy.” No '“atrophy, vaginal.” The fact that there’s a chapter called “Moods and You!” makes me want to actually bludgeon someone to death with a bottle of Zoloft. I slam it shut, return it to the shelf. The book I’m looking for would be called something like Gynaecological Trauma and Bitterness: Your Vagina Is A Fucking Husk, but they don’t seem to have it.

The rage and confusion Rocky battles with, swells out from time to time, making the time worn routines and comforts of the holiday more permeable. Things shift and the years contract and expand as she examines what went before and what is still to come with a new perspective. When it looks like everything will fly apart in the face of the enormity of her feelings, love glues everything back together. Sorrow, guilt and betrayal are trumped time and again by love. Not chocolate box, Instagram perfect love but deep, flawed, beautiful love that is everything real and precious and worth holding onto.

Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly with more love.