Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (audiobook)

 genre: historical fiction, literary fiction

In the Spring of 2020, when everything in the world seems to be collapsing, Laura finds herself pleasantly stuck with her three flown daughters and her husband on their cherry farm in Northern Michigan.  What they have most, as they pick cherries, is TIME.  And so Laura agrees to tell her daughters the story of when she was a young actress who ended up in a summer stock production with a young man who grew up to be a movie star.  And thus, our story switches between two story lines, between the Laura of her youth and the Laura of her present and the sliding back and forth between the two takes no effort at all. 

This book was phenomenal.  Full stop.  The audio performance by Meryl Streep made it even better, IF that is even possible.  It is nostalgic in the most comfy of ways. It is bildungsroman.  It is first true love and loss.  It is the love of the stage and of the connections we make with the people who share the stage with us. It is the love of words and how they make us feel. It is motherhood and a love of the land and the power in letting go of the things that we know don't serve us.  I felt, listening to it, that I had come home to a place I'd never even known.  For me, it is that level of coziness, even with the hard things that happen, because of how it's told to me through a lens of time and of patient processing.  A comfort read in the most literary sense.

I highly, highly recommend the audio.