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Wintering review – learning to love the cold

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/wintering-how-i-learned-to-flourish-when-life-became-frozen-katherine-may-memoir-review

Katherine May brings a poet’s eye to this enthralling celebration of our fallow season

If therapy is a talking cure, this beautiful book – Wintering – is a reading cure. Not that it sets out in a know-it-all way to enlighten. It is too internalised for that. It is a personal, original and wayward examination of the idea that, as humans, we have – and need to have – our fallow seasons, that we must learn to revel in days when the light is low (one of her convincing thoughts is that we live in an overlit age). This is a winter’s tale of hard-won celebration, but – in keeping with other memoirs – it begins with what we are braced to predict will be a catastrophe.

Just before Katherine May’s 40th birthday, her husband – referred to as H – is stricken with appendicitis on Folkestone beach. He is rushed to hospital, where his appendix bursts. May persecutes the nurses on his behalf (“I’m usually too embarrassed to order my own takeaway, but this was different”). His life hangs in the balance, but after making a wonderful and, to us, unexpected recovery, he practically disappears from May’s narrative. It is a rum start because he is so abruptly dropped, his story giving way to hers. May becomes ill and takes leave (before departing altogether) from her job as a creative writing director at Canterbury Christ Church University. Desolation, stomach pain and a gnawing fear of being perceived to be malingering collide. In passing, she mentions that, in adulthood, she was diagnosed as autistic.

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