This book was a good audiobook for a frigid winter week as it takes place during the beach week of a family with grown kids who all love good food. Our narrator is Rocky, the mother, who by her account is always mad and not always sure why, and whose default is to worry about what bad thing might happen. And oh yes, she’s experiencing menopause and has some pretty detailed descriptions of how intimate body parts are failing her. Perhaps this does not sound like a fun, light-heartened book, but Rocky is quick to see when she’s making things worse and can turn on a dime.
She is happy to have this week when the family plus her parents and her son’s girlfriend go to the same house they have been renting every summer since the children were small. Rocky recounts the wonderful and exhausting days when lunch with toddlers on the beach involved sand in everything, the beloved spot they shared so much history, including where Willa came out to her parents.
Sometimes Rocky is wise and a wiseacre at the same time. Here she says, “People who insist that you should be grateful instead of complaining, they maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.”
Her husband Nick is a beautiful man, happy to be in his own world, never angry or upset. He and his family communicate through movie quotes. “At some point during the grinding hours of labor that preceded Jamie’s birth, Nick quoted a line from Three Men and a Baby and I thought, about my marriage to him, I have made a grave error. But then, I woke in the night and saw him by the hospital window. Our swaddled baby was tucked into the crook of his elbow and Nick was whispering to him about the moon and the stars.”
After Rocky’s mother admonishes her to put sunscreen on her legs, Willa says that sounds just like what Rocky says to her. Willa says, “You guys are so proprietary about us. ‘I made your whole body from scratch. The least you can do is put some lip balm on it!'”
I enjoyed the funny moments, the description of yummy tuna salad sandwiches and seafood dinners, and the nostalgia for parenting.
Catherine Newman, Sandwich, Harper, 2024, 229 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.