📚 Review: Holy fuck. This book was absolutely stunning. By page 37, I had cried and laughed out loud multiple times, and had written down 7 quotes and had taken multiple photos of full pages of beautiful writing. I literally cried and laughed out loud through this entire book, and was an absolute mess at the end. In the middle of the night after finishing it, I woke up and thought about it and cried. This book explores themes of grief and loss and the anticipation of these, and what it means to love and the hurt that comes with it. It also talks about what it means to be a parent, and to love your children as they grow. Though I’m not a parent, I absolutely sobbed at this, and about thinking about my mom (how dare I move out and grow up, honestly), and how much love can hurt. The way she used sandwiches to talk about the ways in which Rocky knows her family members so deeply - how different they are, how similar, what their preferences say about who they are - was so beautiful. Something so mundane that drew on the theme of the emotional work many mothers do in tending to their families was so central to this book. The writing was STUNNING, and I loved this book. Catherine Newman writes “It’s just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness.”, and I feel like that’s what this book was. That, and so much more. 

There are so many beautiful quotes I wrote down while reading - I’m including them below. 

💫 Rating: 6/5. This very quickly became one of my favourite books of all time. 

QUOTES: 

“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,” the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “But also so terrible and ridiculous.” 

“What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration. It’s in your stomach. Your spleen. Or it’s just your heart losing its mind.”

“It’s too beautiful to bear — and too much to be worthy of.” 

“What, exactly, are we doing here? Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.” 

“It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at - the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.” 

“Grief bright in the periphery, like a light flashing just out of view.” - literally cried immediately when I read this line 

“There is so much more I want to ask him. About the texture of grief in the household of his childhood.” 

“But grief was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.” 

“I would pick this life too, I know. I’d even pick the way that pain has burnished me to brightness. The pain itself, though? I imagine I’d give it up if I could.” 

“I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go. To be honest, though, I sometimes feel like love is that already.” 

“Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.” 

“And we’ll be as young and as whole as we’re ever going to be.” 

“A transition is so much gentler than an ending.”

“… and what she told me was that I didn’t need to draw so many conclusions, to make so many decisions. That I could just live with all the different parts of life as they were. That I could be happy even though nothing would ever be perfect.” 

“It’s just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness.”

“Imagine trying to make that color yellow just from the soil and sunlight,” Willa said. She was leaning against my father, who was smiling and frowning and dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. “Like, if someone was like, here’s a bowl of dirt. Make two perfect shades of the brightest yellow you ever saw! You totally couldn’t do it.” We agreed that this was true. “So what is that? I mean, I know it’s nature. Photosynthesis. Adaptation. But is it magic too?” We thought that maybe it was.

Not for me. There wasn’t really a plot and I didn’t like any of the characters. There were funny parts, but not a ton of character growth, so this is just a week on the Cape Cod beach with a family. If I were ten years older, I might have been able to identify with the main character a bit more, but my own experience with being in the sandwich generation was my father’s extended illness and death while also having the toddler and the newborn, so her ability to look back on the baby days and worry about her parents with the support of her grown children felt a little luxurious.

She has a knack for saying things the rest of us might think but don't say. I laughed several times. 

An unlikable, overly profane and vulgar narrator of a story with no discernible plot. I am the same age as the narrator and recently visited Cape Cod. You would think it would be completely relatable. Nope, not for a single second. The narrator’s hyper focus on menopause was unrealistic and unbelievable. 

Title: Sandwich
Author: Catherine Newman
Genre: Contemporary
Rating: 4.50
Pub Date: June 18, 2024

T H R E E • W O R D S

Relatable • Nostalgic • Messy

📖 S Y N O P S I S

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

💭 T H O U G H T S

I had the opportunity of travelling to East Sandwich, MA in April 2024 for a grief retreat with some amazing ladies, so adding Sandwich to my TBR was an obvious choice. Marketed as the ultimate summer read, I knew it would be an ode to Cape Cod and the slow pace of life associated with escaping city life and making memories.

Spanning one week, we follow three generations on their annual family vacation, while also getting flashbacks to vacations from years gone by. Exploring themes of motherhood, parenting, shifting family dynamics, ageing, making memories, and the love language of food, this novel wholly embraces Cape life.

Each member of the family has their own personal flaws, yet it is these flaws that makes this such a relatable story. I appreciated being inside Rocky's mind and getting a front row seat to her train of thought, which was at times hilarious. There are definitely summer vacation vibes here, but it also has a layer of depth and serious topics.

Sandwich was the perfect short read for my summer travel. My travel to the area where it is set enhanced my reading experience and ultimately brought the setting to life even more than Newman's writing does. Marketed as a summer read, this one has a lot more emotional depth than I was anticipating, so if you're looking for something light and fluffy, this isn't it. I'll definitely be exploring more of this author's work in the future.

📚 R E A D • I F • Y O U • L I K E
• Cape life
• family vacations
• the love language of food

⚠️ CW: mental illness, post-partum depression, pregnancy, miscarriage, blood, abortion, infertility, sexual content, death, death of parent, grief, body shaming, cursing, alcohol, vomit

🔖 F A V O U R I T E • Q U O T E S

"Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it's love expanding. I don't know. I just know you can't create loss to preempt loss because it doesn't work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it's your last resort, because it is."

"There are wounds that never really heal, no matter how much time they take."

"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." 

"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. <i>Don't move a muscle</i>, I think. But I will of course. You have to."

Holy nostalgia, Batman! 

This book is equal parts heart-wrenching and hilarious, and wholly bittersweet.

The main POV character is 54 year old Rocky, who tells us of this year's annual week-long vacation to Cape Cod with her family, in which she is sandwiched between young adult children and elderly parents. I could relate so much, if not in particulars then in vibes, to the fond recollecting of these trips of the past, when the children were younger and the parents in better health. My own children, my spouse and myself are about a decade behind in age than the family in this book, but we just recently had a similar weeklong beach vacation that has become a tradition, where my parents joined us for part of the time.

This part of the story, the joyful reminiscences of family quality time as well as enjoying one another's company as the people we have evolved to become in the present, made me want to hug this book (alas, I took it in via audio format). There was also a very funny streak, often provided by either Rocky's adult children or else her own internal monologue. 

Less heartwarming but still appreciated was all the commentary about the bodies of middle-aged women. I myself have not yet had the distinct displeasure of perimenopause, but I sure know it's coming for me before too much longer, and it seemed to be addressed really well here. Rocky rails against the betrayals of her own body throughout her adult lifespan, and how it never feels like it belongs just to her. Her family often feels the brunt of her hormone-fueled rage, but she is self-aware enough to recognize that some of the problem is hers, not all theirs.

Then there were more difficult aspects of the story: pregnancy loss (termination and miscarriage), mental health struggles (anxiety, depression, paranoia), personality disorders (narcissism). Discussions of classism and privilege. And the troubling knowledge that one's parents are drawing closer to the inevitable end, along with the constant worry for the wellbeing of one's children. 

There is plenty of talk about sex in this book; there is no violence (but see the above content warnings regarding pregnancy). The audio narrator was amazing, except only that I absolutely despised the voice she chose to use for Rocky's daughter Willa - a twenty year old lesbian described as butch, but whose voice sounded like an especially whiny prepubescent child. I greatly enjoyed the character of Willa - her voice, not so much.

This book made me laugh out loud, it made me tear up, and it made me wish I was physically capable of hugging soundwaves, so in all I think that's worth five stars. Perhaps I'll also make a note to revisit this one when menopause starts knocking at my door...

One of my favorites ever ever. The words, the dialogue, the people — all of it is so heart-stopping, so beautiful, so human and poetic and precious, even as it makes you laugh wildly as you read. The details of the setting, the characters’ histories, the nuances of how they interact — truly, I’ve never read another book with more wondrous and personal shading, layers, and magic. I loved this. I will read it again, and I will go back and read Catherine Newman’s first book, her essays, her non-fiction, and then every word she writes forever.

Spoiler warning

I’ll start with the good, then the bad, then the almost great. This is a very voicy novel of mom, Rocky, at midlife, trying to sort out her life, her responsibilities, her family members’ metamorphoses into new life stages, and most of all, her immense, roller-coaster feelings about it all, while also being on vacation. Being at a similar spot in my own life, I found some of her experiences very relatable- and at times hilarious. Her description of menopause is Pulitzer-worthy on its own. The narrator feels everything so thoroughly which I really love. I want a novel that plunges the depths of the life experience which this one does-almost. The narrator’s observations about her family are very much in the vein of Jen Hatmaker, only more irreverent. Full of love, full of honesty, full of humor, achingly full of life. She goes so deep, but then nearly misses the mark, or does she? 
Which brings me to what I didn’t love. For one thing, the family was far too open with one another, in a cringe-worthy way. Dad getting freaky with mom while college daughter is literally sleeping right next to them is one mild example. You can be open and honest without being gross. 
Speaking of gross, the mom is just kind of awful. She loves everyone so much, as she constantly gushes, but also makes everything about her. Seriously, everything. Her poor husband is totally neglected and her children feel like they have to take care of their mom’s feelings all the time. But, to be fair, mom is going through some really tough stuff, which all comes to a head during this their annual family vacation. And here is the part that I equally love and hate, which I think maybe you are supposed to. 
It is genius. 
Rocky finds that she finally has no other choice than to come unflinchingly clean about her abortion experience. She gets to the heart of what really happened, of what she really did. And it’s utterly heartbreaking. Her young adult daughter, who lives her whole life as though she is an animated hand-held poster at a political rally, is totally confused about why her mom would have any feelings at all about it. Because abortions are totally cool, I think she says somewhere. The rubber really meets the road of the novel here…and then kind of starts to backtrack. Because we’re not supposed to say it out loud, right? Because then we don’t love women, or choice, or freedom or something? You can almost hear Rocky worrying about what her political party would think, (you can almost hear the author herself worrying about it too), but then she tells her daughter that this is real life, not a political ideology. Because here, at midlife, Rocky is finally acknowledging and speaking about what happened to her babies- she always calls them her babies. They had due dates, would-be birthdays. And both babies died, not just the one she wanted. And yet, it’s too horrifying to acknowledge to the full, so it is spoken about euphemistically, or much worse, not at all. Rocky hates this! Just say died and dead, she says. It’s so interesting, but not surprising when you think about it, that Rocky is so angry that she didn’t know that her grandparents died in the Holocaust- why didn’t you tell me?!- but also doesn’t want to know about it. Same with her parents aging. So much going on in this novel that mirrors the human experience. We lie to ourselves and each other- another huge theme in the novel- because otherwise life would be even more terrible than it already is. And that in itself is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful thing. But, also, lying might be the death of us. “Never keep secrets from each other,” Willa advises. All to say that this is why this novel is genius. Many readers will take it at face value because that’s all they can handle- and the author knows it. She can barely handle it herself. But she also loves you too much to keep on lying to you. The truth is wretched, and you should know it for what it is. 

4.5 stars. I don't think SANDWICH is perfectly written: its pace is uneven, and its proclamations about family are somewhat repetitive. But man, does it have heart. Catherine Newman is one of the few writers I've encountered who can put words to everyday feelings of intense sheer love.

A gem and a half -- and set in Cape Cod! You just can't make it better!