Joy Enough (a Memoir)

By (author) Sarah McColl; By (author) McColl, Sarah
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February 2019 Selection, Emma Roberts''s Belletrist Book Club

From a bracing new voice comes this life-affirming memoir of a daughter making and remaking her life in her mother’s image.

Description

Sifting gingerly through memories of her late mother, brilliant newcomer Sarah McColl has penned an indelible tribute to the joy and pain of loving well. Even as her own marriage splinters, McColl drops everything when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, returning to the family farmhouse and laboring over elaborate meals in the hopes of nourishing her back to health. In a series of vibrant vignettes—lipstick applied, novels read, imperfect cakes baked—McColl reveals a woman of endless charm and infinite love for her unruly brood of children.

Mining the dual losses of both her young marriage and her beloved mother, McColl confronts her identity as a woman, walking lightly in the footsteps of the woman who came before her and clinging fast to the joy she left behind. With candor reminiscent of classics like C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, Joy Enough offers a story that blooms with life.

Review quote
"Written with enough beauty to stop clocks ticking and heart''s beating.... McColl''s resonant first book is resplendent with love, and the hope she finds in discovering that her unfathomable grief also carved a space for more profound joy."
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"Even a well-worn topic can become the occasion for stunningly original writing, and such is the case with McColl’s exquisite memoir, Joy Enough.... McColl’s gift is in distilling a lifetime — the relationships, hopes nurtured then dashed, joys still sought, even at life’s end — into vignettes of great beauty, ordinary moments held up for loving examination.... The book begins, slyly enough, with a literary question: ‘I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?’ It turns out that the answer is yes, and if the mother is anything like Allison, you will want to read it, and to know her."
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"It doesn’t take long to find yourself in McColl’s rhythm, attuned to the beautiful colors and fragrances and tastes that lodge themselves in our memories.... McColl’s argument — that these small moments make up a life, that these small moments are life – is persuasive, and it is presented with humor and charm.... This is a book about an extraordinary figure who was a housewife, mother, and divorcee. The word ‘mother’ doesn’t entirely do her justice, and yet that’s what this memoir does: does her justice, in more than a summarizing word."
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"Joy Enough is so compelling that I stayed up most of the night while traveling by train in a sleeper car. Sarah McColl’s exquisite memoir is the perfect balm for anyone who has experienced the sharp sting of loneliness or inhabited the liminal space between grief and happiness."
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"Sarah McColl’s Joy Enough resonates with the immediacy of a love letter and the dark wonder of a dream. A tender, candid, force field of an elegy, compressed and expansive at once."
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"In beautiful, spare prose, Sarah McColl offers an elegant and deeply-felt meditation on loss that is steeped in the pleasures of this life: in good bread and soft sweaters, friendship, flirtation, and especially love. Joy Enough is a memoir about the death of a mother and a marriage, yes, but more than that, it’s about the new life that can spring from those empty spaces. A gorgeous, painful, exhilarating debut."
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"How can a memoirist take as her subject such a dark night of the soul—a simultaneous divorce and the death of a beloved mother—and forge such greedy, life-affirming grace? Sarah McColl’s dense and lyrical narrative vignett