Tag: daughter

Sunday Morning…

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What does he remember best? Ah yes – a Sunday morning when he’s trying to have a lie-in, he needs sleep, all the sleep he can get, he’s been out on the fjord all night. He wakes from a dream, his boat is going down, the wheelhouse slowly filling with seawater; he’s at the bottom of the sea, he’s underwater, lying there helpless on his back, his face turned to the surface. Then he’s suddenly wide awake, one ear full of liquid, both girls sitting on top of him. Eli and Guro have brought a bottle of water into the bed; they giggle when they see his reaction. There is no happiness like this, a Sunday morning, with the early sun hanging above the mountains on the other side of the fjord, a light that settles over the bedclothes, over the floor, over his girls. He hears their breath, their laughter.

— Frode Grytten, The Ferryman and His Wife. Translated from Norwegian to English by Alison McCullough. (Algonquin Books, November 18, 2025)

Notes:

  • Recommended.
  • Book Review by Eileen Garvin: Read This: The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Are you okay, Dad? she asked.
Yes, he said. Will there be someone there to meet you?
Yes, Dad, there will.
Do you have money on you?
Yes, Dad.
Got your passport?
Yes, Dad.
Umbrella?
Yes, Dad.
Contraception?
Yes, Dad.
Do you love me? Yes, Dad.

— Frode Grytten, The Ferryman and His Wife. Translated from Norwegian to English by Alison McCullough. (Algonquin Books, November 18, 2025)

Notes:

  • Recommended.
  • Book Review by Eileen Garvin: Read This: The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn23 Comments

I made a brief visit to see my parents…My father was in the backyard feeding the birds. I hesitated to disturb him but felt an urgency to see him and quietly slipped out back. He was standing at the end of the yard with his back toward me with arms outstretched. As I stood in silence the birds flew to him and covered him, as if a fresco from the painter Giotto’s life cycle of St. Francis of Assisi. I could feel the birds’ affection for him, not merely because he fed them, but because they were responding to his innate goodness. At that moment I had no doubt that he was of a hallowed tribe. Not a perfect man, nor had he produced any known miracle, yet he had the simplicity of a saint, and I the saint’s errant daughter. Somehow sensing my presence, he turned as the birds flew above him and looked at me. Hello doll, he said. Hello, Daddy, I answered.

— Patti Smith, Bread of Angels: A Memoir (Random House, November 4, 2025)

Notes:

(and then) I take root.

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Then I’d promised Fi his favorites—oxtail stew with grits and greens—as soon as I had an operating kitchen, my pots and pans unpacked. Also, baked apples, Epsom salt baths, peppermint oil foot rubs, hot water bottles, green tea, honey, lemon, ginger, and garlic in everything: I treat my children as if they’re faddish Edwardian lepidopterists when they’re tired, poorly, under strain. “I can’t wait to feed you properly,” I’d said. I’d told him how much I’d missed feeding him: all that gathering of ingredients, all those hours in fragrant steam, the piles of food, plates wiped clean. It grounds me to feed my children; they eat and I take root.

— Alexandra Fuller, Fi: A Memoir of My Son (Grove Press, April 9, 2024)
 

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2024 (so far) by NY Times Book Review. Review by David Sheff: “A Mother’s Devastating Memoir of Losing Her Adult Son. In “Fi,” Alexandra Fuller describes the sudden death of her 21-year-old.”

Miracle. All of It.

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When the nurse brought her, all swaddled up, to the glass-panelled door outside the operating theatre to show her to me, tears projectiled on to the glass, signalling the single most miraculous moment of my life. If there’s a nanosecond’s worth of choice when you fall in love, there was no measure of time between seeing Oilly and feeling the most profound, life-changing love imaginable. Beyond all counting! Our longed for, miracle, baby.

— Richard E. Grant, A Pocketful of Happiness: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, August 1, 2023)

Notes:

  • Photo of Richard E. Grant & his daughter Olivia in The Sun, Feb 15, 2019
  • Book review by Amy Bloom in NY Times: Richard E. Grant Fights Grief With ‘A Pocketful of Happiness’. The Oscar-nominated actor’s new memoir is at once a Hollywood air kiss and a moving tribute to a happy marriage that ended too soon.
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”