Fans of Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” can’t stopping talking about it: Marmee March’s confession to her headstrong daughter Jo that “I’m angry nearly every day of my life.”
It’s a line that had never been spoken on film, and only once in a television mini-series. And to those of us who’d buried Louisa May Alcott’s novel about four rambunctious Civil War-era sisters deep in our cobwebbed memories, it sounded unfamiliar and almost shocking.
From quinoa salads discarded at farmers’ markets to pub grub abandoned by fellow diners, it can be quite a varied regime. Park yourself in a central London square on a nice day, and the pricey rice bowls from eateries such as Itsu or Benugo, often still laden with dumplings and prawns and spicy vegetables, pile up alongside overflowing bins. Once I ate my children’s leftovers. Now I eat leftovers from strangers.
I’ve fought a lifelong battle with an urban environment that encourages unhealthy eating – the obesogenic environment, as it has now been defined – and, after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, I seemed destined to be on the losing side. But after adopting a diet that friends and family and experts had deep reservations about, I feel transformed.
This writer understands beauty and loss, sorrow and hope, his fluid writing making the telling seem effortless.
The everyday is the everyday, and within it is built the stuff of heartbreak, beauty, tragedy and joy. Who we are is picked out in the ephemera of who we were. Our junk can be our cornerstones, and Motherwell is an object lesson in memoir.
It’s now within
an hour of sundown of a late
November afternoon.