Happy Saturday!
I’m totally engrossed in a great book called THE DIRTY LIFE, a memoir by Kristin Kimball. Kimball is a Harvard graduate, who worked for years as a freelance writer in NYC before falling in love with a farmer. She gives up a rent-controlled apartment to move to the Lake Champlain area, where she and her then-fiancee start a farm. Their lofty goal: to supply a full diet to their community year-round at a fairly high price point for an economically depressed area. Kimball does an excellent job of describing daily life on the farm including everything from the daily milking to the rat-infested farmhouse she is lucky enough to call home.
I find myself drawn to modern memoirs, with my other recent favorites being THE MIDDLE PLACE by Kelly Corrigan and THE GIRLS FROM AMES by Jeffrey Zaslow. At 25, I would not have appreciated these books. My life is in a place that I quickly latch on to anyone telling their stories filled with raw emotion or significant life loss or gain. Perhaps it’s a longing for confirmation that I am not alone. I’m always feeling so frantic to get where I need to go, physically and emotionally. When I finish books like these, my mind and my heart feel comforted for days because I feel like I’ve made a new friend who is in many ways just like me.
If you have other memoirs you can recommend, please share. Here are the links to the books and websites, FYI.
http://www.amazon.com/Kristin-Kimball/e/B003YNESYE/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1329579315&sr=8-1