Surrealist art, with its convulsive, outlandish juxtapositions, showed Carrington how to discern the folly of the humans she knew. It also invited her to cavort with nonhuman creatures, drawing on their beauty and suffering to make tame ideas about character and plot more porous, elastic, and gloriously unhinged. The distinctions between human and animal, animal and machine, flicker in and out of focus in her early stories, but the fiction she wrote in the nineteen-fifties and sixties dissolves them lavishly.
My mom let me know the tamales are on their way, along with some chile relleno and instructions on how to make the sauce. It won't be the same; I know that. But it will be the closest I've felt to opening a gift at midnight on Noche Buena as a kid in a long time. It will be a small slice of home to hold me over until I can be back in her kitchen again being yelled at for not stirring something properly, and it will mean the world to me.
This holiday season might look and feel a little different without the dinner parties and potlucks we never dreamed of going without, but eating food that reminds me of people I love helps me feel less alone.
“Wintering” does us the great service of reminding us that we are not alone in feeling undone. And although May’s book doesn’t offer a neat, easy ending in which she miraculously feels better, she does offer hope, an antidote to her tendency to “feel like a negative presence in the world.” She finds that hope in the ebb and flow of the seasons.
At the Chicago home of two of the film’s well-to-do backers, Irish Catholics.
There was talk of the baby their daughter had adopted from Uzbekistan.