Welcome to Book Talk, where we help you find new fuel for your bookish obsession. While you might not find these authors while scrolling short-form content online, you will find their work to be significant, impactful, and, hopefully, something you reach for time and again. Happy reading!
Calling May Sarton prolific doesn’t begin to do her justice. In her lifetime, she published 54 books, ranging from poetry, to novels, to her personal and deeply insightful journals. This was on top of her work as a creative writing teacher — at prestigious schools such as Harvard University and Wellesley College — as well as a script writer and essayist. Much of her writing drew from personal experience, including love, queerness, and creativity, and, later in life, her experience of illness and aging.
For the first time since writing this column, I can’t recall how I came across a writer. All I know is that I found Journal of a Solitude (1973) — at a thrift store? Mentioned online by someone I follow? — and, after reading only 10 or so pages, promptly ordered every one of her journals from ThriftBooks.
If you haven’t gotten the picture yet, I romanticize much of life and fall in love easily — with books, authors, words, and ideas, among other things. Since finding and falling hard for Sarton, I’ve been working my way through her journals at a pace that allows me to digest them wholly before moving on. Which is so unlike me — beyond romanticizing, I also devour — that it’s brought me pause, wondering just how I found something, finally, that allows me to slow down and notice.
I think this is because Sarton was, in a way, like this too. Her journals are full of slow wonderings about her world and beyond: she meanders between feminism and women in art to what she’ll plant in her garden come spring. Everything she writes is thoughtful, and while she doesn’t drag things out, she does give the perfect amount of time to each thought — whether it requires a line or an entire page.
(It just so happens that, after over a year with no Sarton, I’ve recently started Recovering: A Journal (1980). While it’s too soon to say for certain, already I feel like I’m coming home to an old friend.)
I hope that, when I reach the age Sarton was when she wrote her journals, I have half as much wisdom about the world around me. I’ll leave you with a sliver of her insight:
“I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep … Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass.”
Happy reading!
