Review: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Gaby Meares
I love the ‘idea’ of this book, but my enjoyment was marred by a pervading sense of privilege that I find discomforting. But then, the reality is that it’s only from a position of privilege that a writer has the opportunity to spend the time exploring existential questions about surviving dark times.
As a whole, I found the book lacks cohesion, however, there are paragraphs that resonate, particularly May’s return to the comfort of children’s books: Philip Pullman’s [b:Northern Lights|70947|Northern Lights|Philip Pullman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327235223l/70947.SY75.jpg|1536771] and a favourite of mine, Lucy M. Boston’s [b:The Children of Green Knowe|377889|The Children of Green Knowe (Green Knowe, #1)|Lucy M. Boston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1282757940l/377889.SX50.jpg|859023], where she asks ‘How is it that we can code so carefully the weight of loss, grief, time and continuity into our children’s books, but forget them so thoroughly ourselves?’
And there are other moments in this memoir where I thought ‘Ah, yes, I know this feeling too’. For example:
‘There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards.
I felt validated by a 2007 study by Harvard Medical School that May notes. Apparently ‘knitting can lower blood pressure as much as yoga and can also help to relieve sufferers of chronic pain by releasing serotonin’. Further research found that the health benefits of crafting include ‘maintaining mental sharpness, helping smokers to quit and reducing loneliness and isolation in the elderly’. May applies this research by taking up knitting; I took up crochet during Covid lockdowns and can verify that it helped me get through my own ‘wintering’!
May obviously did much research to write this book; I’m disappointed to see there is no bibliography included.
As you can see, I have mixed emotions about this book. On the whole, the scale tips past the halfway mark, so I give it 3 stars!