Pig Years
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
This captivating memoir is a “startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals” (Anthony Doerr, best-selling author of All the Light We Cannot See), as an itinerant farmhand chronicles the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth.
Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as “engrossing” and “a marvel.” As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and stark full moons, the sharp cold days lives near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter’s dark descends, Pig Years draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter.
In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gaydos brings her experience farming, in particular breeding animals for slaughter, to a debut that's in turns lyrical and brutal. Gaydos grew up wanting to work on a farm and quickly found after landing her first job in the field at age 18 that the life suited her. "Most years I don't make it over the poverty line.... I could find a better-paying job if I wanted... this is the compensation for the crude work of training life into channels of fecundity." She writes of raising animals and later slaughtering them, creating a thick sense of tension as her loving descriptions of raising "handsome" pigs give way to the revelation that, "At noon the next day we shoot them." Indeed, Gaydos brings a realist view to her work: when killing chickens, for instance, she notes that it's bad for beheaded birds to keep moving because doing so "could bruise the breast meat." She's similarly straightforward in relating emotionally fraught events, such as a miscarriage ("Working the New Lebanon farmer's market that Sunday, I fully miscarry"). It all adds up to a powerful meditation on the cycle of life, "the flowering of the earth, its bloom and attendant rot." This one will stick with readers long after the last page is turned.
