Date: 27 November 2020
Location: Zoom
Another Zoom meeting of the Happy Bookers. This month we discussed Late Migrations by NY Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl.
Renkl–a native Alabamian born in Andalusia and raised mainly in Birmingham–now lives and writes in Nashville. The book Late Migrations is a collection of about a hundred short essays covering a variety of subjects as described by the book’s subtitle A Natural History of Love and Loss.
Many of the essays express Renkl’s feelings and appreciation for the natural world. Her descriptions of the creatures that she enjoys – the birds, insects, squirrels, chipmunks, snakes, etc. — are wonderful and moving. For example, describing the loss of bluebird eggs in a nest–probably to a snake–she writes, “…everything that lives will die, and everything that dies will be eaten. … That’s the way wildness works, and I know it. I was heartbroken anyway.”
Many of the essays describe her childhood experiences growing up in a loving family. In fact, several of the essays are in the voice of her maternal grandmother, taken from recordings her brother had made with her grandmother many years earlier. These included an essay her grandmother had written but never published about how she had been shot.
The other set of especially moving essays address the losses we all experience as time moves on and loved ones pass away. She was especially saddened by the unexpected death of her mother. Later when another relative died, she mused, “…the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom; the end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.”
All the Bookers really enjoyed this book. Renkl has the remarkable ability to observe both the natural world around her and her internal world of memories and emotions, and she then expresses her thoughts in wonderful and moving prose. She is the kind of author we would like to have as a friend.
— Bob