Summerwater
I know everyone loves a gratitude journal. That’s great and all, but a gratitude journal doesn’t really do much for me. (Don’t misunderstand: I try to “practice gratitude” on the regular and of course am thankful for many, many things…I’m not a sociopathic lunatic, ok?)
Instead, at different points in my life, I’ve kept what I guess I’d call a “surprise journal.” (Can a stationery company please design an official version with that “surprise, surprise” lady on the cover?) The difference between looking for “surprises” and “being thankful” is nuanced, but I do think it’s different because…surprises can sometimes be bad. And I think that being aware of the abruptness of a “bad” surprise can, hopefully, remind us that a good surprise might be around the corner as well. For me, this mindset allows me to hold certain things loosely while simultaneously appreciating simple gifts even more.
Sarah Moss’ Summerwater, interlocking chapters about different people and families on holiday at a group of cabins in Scotland, gives readers this experience. Moss was recommended to me by @cassie.stroud — we initially connected on Instagram because of a shared love for Carol Shields, and in true Shieldsian form (yeah, I just coined that) Moss meticulously mines the inner lives of her characters and in the case of Summerwater, their preoccupations with how things may have been in the past — for better or for worse. That’s likely a tool Moss is using to nudge and poke at ideas of how the UK should “be.” (This is a post-Brexit work.) But as I was reading, all I could think about was how *surprised* people were at things like: where their “earlier selves” disappeared to or what young people are like “these days.” She even serendipitously throws in a man’s reference to “pasta surprise.” There is a fixation on death, which of course is the most unsurprising (but still often surprising) human experience.
The denouement of Summerwater is surprising. While Moss hints at things, nothing happens in the way of a traditional plot-driven novel nor according to the way that many readers have been “trained.”
Maybe Moss has been keeping a surprise journal…
originally published on instagram