The Best Beach Read For People Who Don't Like Beach Reads

Also: the best book about motherhood for moms who don't want to read about motherhood

For a long, long time here at In Pursuit, my essay about a house tour that made me cry was dubbed my “most popular” by Substack’s algorithm. Given the fact that In Pursuit is (largely) a newsletter about momfluencer culture and toxic maternal ideals, this was sort of surprising. 

But it’s less surprising when you consider whose house tour it was that made me cry, and whose humanity was on display in said house tour. Because that person is

Catherine Newman

, who writer Joanna Rakoff RIGHTLY calls a national treasure. 

joannarakoff

A post shared by @joannarakoff

Catherine’s authored numerous books and penned several memorable essays for Cup of Jo, and her New York Times bestselling book, Sandwich, which is new in paperback, might be the perfect beach read for folks averse to beach reads. There’s no meet-cute, there’s no impossibly glamorous location, and there’s no juicy murder to solve. But there are beaches! There’s love. And there’s loads of heart.

As the title implies, Sandwich explores the experience of a woman caring for both her young adult children and her elder parents. And her husband. And her larger-than-life cat (NAMED CHICKEN). And mostly, crucially, herself. 

The book is a treatise on mid-life reckonings, both big and small, but friends, it is also a BEACH READ. The fact that the particular beaches visited in Sandwich are the same Cape Cod beaches I visit every year with my family dialed up the resonation factor for me tenfold, but I can’t imagine anyone who has ever dabbled with family beach vacations not finding something to love in Sandwich. There are (thankfully) several delectable sandwiches, but there’s also lobster (and NOT DANIEL’S LOBSTER); crisp white wines; lemony herby fish; buttery corn on the cob. CHIPS AND DIP. I love summer food and I love summer books full of summer foods. The mouth-watering culinary descriptions are reason number 73 out of innumerable reasons to love Sandwich.

Reason 182 to love Sandwich is passages like this, which, after audibly chortling, I immediately texted to friends.

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 mean.

So yes, you will salivate reading this book, you will feel your toes vicariously stretched out into hot sand, you will laugh with pangs of recognition, and, if your kids are still little (or littleish), you might experience (as I did) a curious case of pre-nostalgia.

My children are 12, 10, and 6, and while the big ones can roll their eyes like the most jaded of teenagers, they’re still young enough for their disgust to feel sort of cute, a little funny. I’m still in the land of dimpled fingers, early bedtimes, hand-holding, and desire for me to look mama look.

While of course I’ve read books featuring protagonists with mostly grown children, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so thoroughly excavates the vast breadth of parental experiences throughout the ages (of both parent and child) before reading this one. 

Sandwich jumps back and forth in time, as the protagonist, Rocky, sorts through, evades, and ultimately comes to terms with an event from her early days of motherhood. In one such flashback, Rocky talks to her four-year-old about it being ok to pee in the ocean but not “right here” on the beach sand.

He was studying me with his big brown eyes. Eyes, nose, mouth. The children’s features shattered me a little bit– as if someone had siphoned love out of me and tattooed it onto someone else’s face. 

“I’m just closing my eyes for a sec, honey. Pat Willa back to sleep if she wakes up,” I said, and Jamie said, “Okay, Mama.” It was one thousand degrees and a greenfly was buzzing around us and, within my own swimsuit, my breasts ached. I was starving. I was pregnant. I was sick and thirsty. I was gutted with love for these sparkling children. Bodies of my body. Inside and out—brain, heart, uterus; mouth, skin, breasts—not a single part of me was my own.

This is not decontextualized, sanitized nostalgia for a Hallmark version of early motherhood. This is, instead, the whole truth of one particular season of motherhood. I don’t have a kid named Jamie or Willa, but I am that mother avoiding the greenfly and attempting to simultaneously hold onto my children’s ephemeral and essential child-ness while also trying desperately to shake off the fetters of maternal love. The desire to swallow them whole while also fighting to make myself whole.

And when Rocky night swims with her twenty-something daughter, I am night swimming with my twenty-something daughter and grieving my baby daughter, my toddler daughter, my currently sassy and hilarious 10-year-old daughter.

A tiny head pops out of the water a couple of feet from us, and I scream. Willa screams too. We grab each other, screaming and laughing and drowning while two little googly eyes blink at us. It is not a snake. It’s a turtle the size of a potato chip, and it dips back under before we can even stop screaming.

“Tell me,” Willa says, breathless, once the screaming/laughing switch has been flipped back to OFF. Her eyes are huge and soft in the light of the moon. The children become the adults. It’s too beautiful to bear—and too much to be worthy of.

Both children and summer traditions encourage this type of grappling with time. A newborn is a different beast entirely from a one-year-old. A toddler is miles away from a 7-year-old whose best friend no longer wants to play in the sandbox with him at recess. A disinterested, door-slamming teenager becomes someone who chooses to spend their vacation days with their parents reliving beloved family memories. It’s brutal and shocking that one bundle of humanity is so many different people and that we, as parents, are so many different people parenting our shape-shifting children.

lyz

memorably wrote about her hatred of parenting books, which I share. I’ve fielded countless recommendations for this book or that book that would very likely provide me with tools or insight to more adeptly tackle a particular parenting challenge, and I don’t think I’ve ever even added a single one of them to an online cart. I am always parenting. I’m parenting when my children are asleep. I’m parenting when I am asleep. The last thing I want to do at the end of a day full of parenting is read about parenting. As Lyz writes, “I wanted to be a human being and raise human beings. And I was so sick of all this fucking advice. And I could just read novels and ponderous histories of Heisenberg instead and my kids would come out the same.”

Sandwich, of course, is not a parenting book. It’s a novel. But if someone were to loosely describe the general plot of Sandwich - a middle aged mother dealing with aging parents and young adult kids on a weeklong summer vacation - I’m not sure I’d be interested. I don’t want to learn about parenting during my reading hours and I also don’t really want to read about fictional parenting during my reading hours. Give me college students making terrible choices and dreaming unattainable dreams. Give me rich people behaving badly. Give me anyone from a world or time different from my own. I have plenty of Goldfish crumbs, awkward playdate dynamics, spousal arguments about best practices, heartbreaking birthday party exclusions, and mysterious bedtime tears to crave any such stuff in my fiction. I don’t want to relate. I want to escape. 

What I’m trying to say is that Sandwich is a book about a middle-aged mom dealing with her adult kids and her aging parents but it’s also decidedly not that. It’s a book that plumbs the experience of parenthood without being about parenthood. It’s a book that sings about the beautiful liminal moments of parental corporeality - the soft heaviness of a baby sleeping on one’s chest - only to bring us back to earth with sticky, grabbing, needing hands and the effort of ongoingness.

lianafinck

A post shared by @lianafinck

Regular readers will know that I’ve never been one to wax poetic about motherhood. So many aspects of it that I’d been trained to view as essential (patience, warmth, openness, willingness, selflessness, softness) are difficult for me and/or at odds with who I am as a person. I am told to “cherish the little things” and “savor the childhood years” and “that they grow up so fast” and my response is always violent.

I don’t want to cherish ALL the little things. I want freedom to HATE some of them.  Because I do! But reading Sandwich made me consider how my own discomfort with treacly maternal ideals and platitudes also might have the unintended effect of preventing me from crystallizing the moments I actively want to crystallize. Like the fact that my daughter views sleeping with me as a treat. That my oldest still wants to read with me. That my youngest has a stick collection he’s inordinately proud of.

In an interview,

Amanda Montell

and I talked about cultivating nostalgia for our present lives, and Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, in addition to making me crave tartar sauce and the coziness of a hoodie on a cool summer night, is one of the first books about the myriad stages of parenting that has made me step back from the chaos of now and choose to hold it close. Even for a moment.

And then, of course, it’s back to telling kids to get their own snacks.

* A version of this essay was originally published here.