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Maybe someday
42
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
8/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Ellyn Gaydos
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
June 14, 2022
As a seasonal farmer in upstate New York and Vermont-living hand-to-mouth, but in love with the land and its creatures-Ellyn Gaydos understands the delicate balance between loss and gain. Choosing such work instead of moving to the city with her long-distance boyfriend, Gaydos recognizes her role in cycles bigger than herself. Yearning to be a mother, she recognizes, too, how new life is mirrored in everything that surrounds her: livestock, full moons, endless acres of green that seem to blossom overnight. But there's tragedy on the farms as well: fields gone barren, opioid addiction, and animals meeting their end too soon. While small farms struggle to survive in the face of industrial operations, low wages, and loneliness, Gaydos takes us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are turned into star-bright symbols of hope, and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, and the slaughter.
What The Reviewers Say
The premise of Ellyn Gaydos’s debut memoir Pig Years may seem unpromising, at least to urbanites. And yet even if you’ve never given farming a thought, Gaydos is a writer of such vigorous eloquence that you’ll find yourself riveted.
Memoirs about farming tend to slide in one of two directions: the farce or the ode. Neither of those genres is as satisfying as what we have in Ellyn Gaydos’s debut memoir, Pig Years, about her life as a farmhand in New York and Vermont. What this young writer has given us is more of a memento mori, rendering realistic scenes full of vivid and sometimes bizarre detail, always with an acknowledgment — on the surface or just under it — of the inescapable facts that life entails death, and growth, and arises from decay.
Stunning.
Gaydos' close eye on the natural world allows us to vividly see the cycle of a farm's blossoming and dying seasons. She doesn't look away from any part of it, either from newborn pig life, for instance, or from the pigs' later deaths—the procedures of slaughter and the preparation of the pork that she will eat and sell.
