June 25, 2024

SANDWICH, by Catherine Newman

On Sunday night, the evening before my 45th birthday, which is “halfway to 90,” as my youngest child keeps noting, that very same child’s tooth fell out, an occasion that was once momentous in our household, but has ceased to be. I ended up breaking a ten dollar bill with coins from her piggy bank in order for the tooth fairy duties to be fulfilled, and it occurred me that it won’t be long now before my tooth fairy days are behind me, which felt especially poignant since I was in the middle of Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a novel that is both a beach read about a Cape Cod family holiday and an exploration of the “reproductive mayhem” that is the female experience. Told from the perspective of Rocky, stuck between love and obligation to her elderly parents and her just-grown kids, all of whom have joined her and her husband at the cramped seaside rental as she grapples with hot flashes and menopausal rage, and long-hidden secrets come back to the surface.

“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still, and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course, You have to.”

This is a novel about the enormity of human experience, about ideas that are terrible, heavy and monstrous—the Holocaust, the Patriarchy. It’s about miscarriage, and death, and something called “vaginal atrophy,” and the fragile nature of the human heart, literally and otherwise. It’s about how to love is to lose, eventually, and how far away the overwhelming experiences of early parenthood (experiences that Newman documented in her own popular blog back in the day) eventually becomes, which seems impossible when you’re in it, and about the delights and frustrations of adult children, and the heartache of seeing one’s parents get old. And it’s all so fun, and so breezy, like your best friend is writing you a chatty letter (like a blog), you’ll even laugh, just as you will likely cry, and that balance is a seesaw too, and Newman gets it exactly right.

“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human… But also so terrible and ridiculous.”