PIG YEARS

"Gaydos' cleareyed, sometimes intense perspective reminds us that farm work is not always pretty: It often involves constant near-poverty, injuries, even desperation. Still, Pig Years is a poetic meditation on fertility, loss and the farmworkers who eke out a marginal living as long as they can. It's a narrative that evokes the pleasures and perils of life and work on a small farm."

Read more...

"...the overall effect is of access and intimacy; Gaydos lets us into her world, and we follow her to the worthy and unforgiving place where nature and agriculture meet."

Read more...

"The rhythms of Ellyn Gaydos’s new memoir ‘Pig Years’ are the rhythms of nature, of life itself and, yes, death, too. No wonder the book, with its slow burn of uncomfortable facts and sober truth, burrows under the reader’s skin.” 

 

—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Chances Are….

Pig Years by Ellyn Gaydos is delicious with the brilliance and rot and green fire. We hear much about place-based writing, and that’s in here, done wonderfully. But what most helps Gaydos’ work shine is the daily and honest realization that the heart is a place, too. Please read this messy, beautiful book. 

--Rick Bass, author of For a Little While

PIG YEARS is a marvel of a memoir – one to be savored. Gaydos shoulders bounty and despair with grace, modeling a radiant sense of interdependence. 

This book showcases a most vibrant and heart-ful almanac of sorts– you can hear and smell the pull of vegetables, and the boot-tromping around the muck and mud so clearly, you too will herald these seasons spent working and tending the land. 

--Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments

Pig Years is a lush account of the everyday splendor of small farm work, from the soil to the slop, from the blades of machinery to the bodies of animals in rut. It is a love song to this labor, and to the physicality of the world.

--Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had and Notes from No Man’s Land

Ellyn Gaydos' accounts of her pigs and the farms they live on are told with studied compassion and exquisitely observed detail. She brings us intimately into the vital, unrelenting work of a small produce farm; we feel, with her, the biting cold and the weight of the mud, as well as the peaceful intervals of rest and human companionship. With crystalline expression Gaydos relates her experience of a dedicated farmer's life, and her very personal testimony is an engrossing pleasure. 

--Lydia Davis, author of Essays: One and Essays: Two

Pig Years is a pulsing, keen, and startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals. Its paragraphs conjure the fecundity of life, the brutality of loss, and the grace of a life lived in the grooves of the seasons.

--Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize winning author of CLOUD CUCKOO LAND and ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Gustave Flaubert famously wanted to write “a book about nothing,” sustained only by “the internal force of its style.” Are pigs “nothing,” one might wonder? The premise of Ellyn Gaydos’s debut memoir Pig Years (Knopf, $27) may seem unpromising, at least to urbanites. And yet even if you’ve never given farming a thought, Gaydos is a writer of such vigorous eloquence that you’ll find yourself riveted.

To speak of a narrative arc or plot in Pig Years seems beside the point: farming is a cyclical endeavor. The events described take place between 2016 and 2020, when Gaydos worked as a hired hand on various farms in upstate New York and Vermont. Certain characters, both human and animal, recur: Gaydos’s partner Graham is a constant, and she has an enduring friendship with two farmers, Ethan and Sarah, who are initially a couple and subsequently co-workers. But the pigs follow an annual rhythm of birth, fattening, and inevitable slaughter that resists traditional narrative satisfaction. Lovers of Charlotte’s Web will repeatedly wish for salvation. In particular, there appears late in the memoir a scrawny pig named Gudrun, sister to Theresa and Ursula, “preternaturally fast-running and hairy like a calf, a strange and half-starved creature, part of her porcine identity lost to sickness,” for whom this naïve reader held out great hope. It turns out that Gaydos’s friend Sarah does, too, though for Gudrun’s sister: “Can’t we pardon Theresa?” she asks. And yet the pigs’ trajectory is inexorable, and Gaydos describes their deaths and brutal dismantling with dispassionate care:

The whole house is infused with the suffocating smell of ripe fat. Everywhere—under nails, in hair, on walls, in dishes, and on whiskers—there are little flecks of pink flesh.

The memoir imparts an abiding sense of the gravity of these acts—of raising, tending, and killing animals; of planting, nurturing, and harvesting vegetables—that lends an almost sacred quality to Gaydos’s prose. There is a compact between humans and the animals, between humans and the land, an acknowledgment that necessity has always driven, and will always drive, the annual cycle. The year’s last harvest takes place after the frost, on a day of thaw:

Tugged from the cold mud, the leeks are gathered into piles, and the white stringy roots, clotted with earth, severed. We are blue-lipped, crawling through the partially thawed mud and snow, ineptly sawing away at piles of leeks.

Humans and leeks, in the end, are not so very different.

Unplotted, the memoir is, like life, peppered with significant, unforeseeable incidents: animals escape and must be retrieved; a long-troubled co-worker dies by suicide; Gaydos, eager for a child, becomes pregnant, but loses the baby. It is enlivened by the author’s vivid conjuring of the people around her: not just her extended family and fellow farmhands, but also the longtime residents of the disintegrating Sufi commune in New Lebanon, New York, which surrounds Ethan and Sarah’s farm. We come to find familiar, if not to know, the feisty bartender at the Gallup Inn, and the families out for a day’s entertainment at the Lebanon Valley Speedway. Gaydos illuminates a traditional way of life—one of grueling labor, physical exhaustion, and ravenous hunger, filled with challenges yet punctuated by exhilarating joys—that is, in our era of material carelessness, emotional detachment, and spiritual confusion, a reminder of life’s elemental urgency, and, amid the magnified minutiae of each day, its astonishing beauty. She achieves this through the meticulous and enlivened observation simply of what is. We see it even in the book’s opening paragraph, in which a pig named M.J. approaches her lunch:

There is always other life on the sows, fallen elderberries stuck between coarse hairs, their seven-hundred-pound frames animated by the movement of green inchworms and errant piglets. M.J., in heat again, arrives panting before her midday bucket of cream. Her simple pig vulva has become full and dewy, a clean point of expectant flesh.

It would not have occurred to this reader until now that a sow’s vulva might occasion such loveliness: prose style is a kind of magic.

Read more...

Gaydos brings her experience farming, in particular breeding animals for slaughter, to a debut that’s in turns lyrical and brutal. Gaydos grew up wanting to work on a farm and quickly found after landing her first job in the field at age 18 that the life suited her. “Most years I don’t make it over the poverty line.... I could find a better-paying job if I wanted... this is the compensation for the crude work of training life into channels of fecundity.” She writes of raising animals and later slaughtering them, creating a thick sense of tension as her loving descriptions of raising “handsome” pigs give way to the revelation that, “At noon the next day we shoot them.” Indeed, Gaydos brings a realist view to her work: when killing chickens, for instance, she notes that it’s bad for beheaded birds to keep moving because doing so “could bruise the breast meat.” She’s similarly straightforward in relating emotionally fraught events, such as a miscarriage (“Working the New Lebanon farmer’s market that Sunday, I fully miscarry”). It all adds up to a powerful meditation on the cycle of life, “the flowering of the earth, its bloom and attendant rot.” This one will stick with readers long after the last page is turned.

A writer and transient farmer chronicles multiple seasons of work and life.

In her debut memoir, spanning four years of her life, Gaydos proceeds chronologically according to the season. Early on, she introduces Graham, an old friend and painter with whom she began a romantic relationship; that bond forms a constant amid the temporary settings of her jobs. Gaydos clearly loves Graham, as she also loves writing and her family, but they are secondary to the work she has chosen. Despite her other loves, “there is the problem that I am promised to the farm.” Each of the farms where she has worked may have different specialties in different locations, but they are alike in their rural settings, menial pay, and painstaking labor. Gaydos describes the realities of farm life with honest precision, neither indulging in unnecessary dramatizing nor shying away from the numerous harsh realities. “The rooster named Commander succumbs to the breeding of flies,” she writes. “He is under the care of the three-year-old….Commander isn’t getting better. One day the farmer takes him out of his cage and cuts off his head with a shovel, [a] compassionate act.” The most affecting passages focus on the people the author met in the communities where she has lived. Gaydos describes an evening spent at the Lebanon Valley Speedway’s annual Eve of Destruction demolition derby event, a spectacle that was marred by the death of a driver a few years prior, killed when his RV collapsed upon impact with a Jeep. Despite the tragedy, “a lot of people wanted to keep the show going….Someone in town told me…that people die what seems like every other year on this track.” The incident illustrates in dramatic fashion what Gaydos paints in broad strokes throughout her book, a complex and fraught portrait of a lifestyle that is simultaneously protective, precarious, and resistant to change.

Lyrical and cleareyed insight into farming from a writer devoted to both crafts.

""Pig Years" is an unsparing look at a tough way of living. Gaydos is careful to bleed any romance out of the hard, hard work of farming, yet stripped to its essence, its meaning and its importance, she reveals it to be a beautiful thing."

Read more...

 An ode to pig farming that waxes poetic in its simple majesty; readers will revel in the beautiful imagery and lyricism of this tribute to farm life in Vermont and upstate New York. Husbandry is portrayed with the rhythmic storytelling of Gaydos’s masterful, rapturously refreshing, and immersive writing: a delicate balance between the graceful beauty and cruel reality of farm life, loss and abundance, longing and belonging. Gaydos’s narration is so beautiful and omniscient, it feels less like a farmer’s almanac than a guided meditation through the Northeast’s harsh winters and hot summers. Her clean linen language and sophisticated writing style is sure to move readers as it turns a pigsty into an oasis and a sunburn into a warm weather kiss. Readers will fall in love with Gaydos’s humble commitment to feeding her soul through farming. More than a memoir; it’s a sensory experience of the complexities of loving and living the not-so simple simple life while hovering just above the poverty line.

VERDICT This diamond in the rough is sure to be a bestseller. It would support and complement any library collection for its history, husbandry, and honesty.

Read more...

"In Gaydos’s soft and honest delivery, the struggles and joys of life — plant, human, animal — come across as neither graphic nor gratuitous, but simply real."

Read more...