Everything Everywhere All at Once: A Guest Post by Catherine Newman
Pushed and pulled between her parents and her children, a woman faces her past and her future in a story about the ins and outs and joys of life. Read on for an exclusive essay from Catherine Newman on writing Sandwich.
Paperback $18.99
Sandwich: A Novel
Sandwich: A Novel
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.99
From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.
From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.
During the Q&A at my Sandwich book events, somebody will inevitably ask me to what extent Rocky, the main character, is based on me and my own life, and I like to pause like I’m thinking and then shrug and shake my head and say, “Not at all.”
This has never not gotten a laugh. It is hard to imagine that Rocky is purely fictional—and that’s because she’s not. That character is really what the book is about. It’s about a family beach vacation, definitely. A week on the Cape with young adult children and aging parents. All of that, of course. But it’s mostly a book about Rocky’s experience being exactly who she is. Rocky, with her layered memories of motherhood, everything sandy and sunny and joyful and gritty. Rocky, with her preemptive grief. Rocky, with the same body she’s been hauling to this same beach for decades: a body that’s been pregnant and nursing and miscarrying and perimenopausal and, now, fully peel-all-your-clothes-off-at-the-clam-shack menopausal. All of it.
Sometimes when people ask me about the book, I quote the name of that brilliant film Everything Everywhere All at Once, because nothing has ever so perfectly encapsulated the way life is as that title does for me. The full catastrophe! All the beauty and sorrow of it. And so, when readers come up to me sometimes in the signing line at a bookstore, that’s what they want to say. And they even cry a little bit, too, sometimes. And I’ll cry back! The call and response of fragile, emotional, middle-aged women. Because we feel seen by each other. Because we’re saying yes, I understand how you feel. I am prone to hyperbole, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that it has been one of the most profound experiences of my life.
Wreck, the novel that continues Rocky’s story, is coming out in the fall, which is so exciting to me. And meanwhile I’m writing, of course, because that’s what I do. And I thought you might like to understand a little bit about the way things happen for me. The way I get my ideas about, say, the “character” of Rocky’s dad, Mort. This is the text I got from my own dad yesterday:
As my daughter likes to say: If you don’t want to end up in her books, don’t give her such good material.