This book looks at what it means to ‘winter’, in other words hunker down in the coolder months and use that time to reflect on the world we are in and our place in it. May captures the reflective mood of the season without sentimentality, and yet with a depth of humanity I’ve rarely encountered in this type of book often marketed as ‘self help’. I’ve commended this book to so many people and do so unreservedly here.
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I liked how peaceful and wholesome this book felt. It gave some support and solidarity for listening to your body and taking things slower during winter. For planning ahead and enjoying the antisocial nature of turning within and enduring. There were times when it meandered a little far, but equally all chapters were delightful in where they took me. I feel better for having absorbed it! I would recommend it to anyone who is not feeling they are delivering and are worried winter is the cherry on top. You are not alone and not letting anyone down! Read this book.
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This is a wise book, beautifully painful. It is a necessary riposte to the tragic delusion that life is supposed to be wonderful all of the time. It is also a celebration of life. The book, the writer says, is not about beauty but about reality. That reality must include our winterings or deep depressions. Wintering is related to Sylvia Plath's usage in Ariel. Winter and Summer are cyclic, and so are human lives. A friend of the author who has bipolar turned to cold, literal cold, as a coping strategy. We must face the cold. We must face our shame, guilt, worthlessness, and all the other elements of miserable rumination. (And save us from the perfumed platitudes of plastic demands to be happy! "This is where we are now: endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity, while erasing the dirty underside of real life. I always read brutality in those messages: they offer next to nothing.") I don't feel able in a brief review to greatly value this book. It is both delicate and earth-heavy. It's no 'Rings of Saturn' but does have a way of incorporating nature, history, myth, poetry, a sprinkling of humour (unlike Sebald!). Unless you would specifically benefit from some fascinating facts about bees or the hibernation habits of dormice, the book gives the reader nothing to 'use'. It's not a self-help book, though it is one of the most helpful books about depression I have ever read. As May writes, "Usefulness, in itself, is a useless concept when it comes to humans." In the life between the delicacy of language and the cold earth is a big thing, call it a big idea because language even at its most delicate is often empty. But this 'big idea' is not propositional, it's something that emerges in shadow and shifting glimpses, of which May writes, "Some ideas are too big to take in once and completely." Her book, she says, did not go as planned (which was, perhaps based on her academic mindset) to be based on research into the world's traditions and stories of winter) because life, experience got in the way. The book is a representation of May's experience of experiencing life as it unfolded, as she took on the very hard and lonely confrontation with reality (hers, yours and mine). While the writing has a sort of domestic level, daily matters, this enhances the whole since it is the mundane that is realistically of this world, and our soil of knowing anything at all. But to me, the book is not only full of sparkling sentences and frost-sharp insights, it is a literary work that will survive the annual Spring book culling, a work to savour and return to. It is written for all of us. You don't need to be some high brow academic. May writes of Plath's Ariel, "Its sentences meander across lines and stanzas; its meanings blur. In it, I find a kind of disorder, as though we are dropped into the middle of a thought process whose beginning and end we can’t perceive." There's something of this in 'Wintering' as in any excellent piece of writing. The final section both appealed to me personally, and through light on something I'd never articulated. It's about losing voice. This was literal in May's case but I take it as figuratively how some of us are never settled with one voice, using our council estate voice here, our teacherly voice there: our voice is not simply referenced upon our various social roles and their confusions, but is deeper in the identity of who we are and how we perceive. I think this book can be seen as an author in search of a voice, and I think she found it because it sings beautifully. One of myriad aspects of our winterings is that in our worst moments even our best (such as having created a wonderful book like this) may seem worthless. But that is part of our stories as we ceaselessly negotiate reality, rather than the futile task of trying to make reality conform to us. "That’s what humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that no longer fit and trying on new ones for size." May can move fluently between such homely language and discussing John Donne. Sometimes life sucks, she writes. The domestic, the ordinary details of everyday life are not in some lesser universe than the contemplative, neither should such dualism arise. What is certain such as dogma or cat vomit is no more or less important than wavering metaphysical ponderings but neither should be taken as a final state of being. Whether we like it or not we find a voice, a perspective, between the poles of concepts. We are "infinitely ,,,,complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair.... All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us." This quotation refers to our being human together. And having mentioned weaving and fabrics, May refers (at the 'mere' level of her life in reality) to research that suggests strongly that knitting should be prescribed by doctors!
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Loved this book. I poured over the pages in about 4 days. It resonated with me on so many levels and helped me understand what I am currently going through. Thank you for writing this book, it was just what I needed even when I didn't know it.
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Recommend
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A very enjoyable hygge type book but with a bit more emotional challenge ..it’s changed the way I look at the ‘wintering’ periods of my life …in a good way
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This book seemed more like a wander through the mind of someone with stage one autism than a guide to coping with distress. Although the digression into the way different cultures cope with winter was charming I found myself hoping for more insights into the author’s personal history. She revealed she had autism, l wondered if that was the reason for her breakdown at 17 and l wondered if her son’s difficulties at school occurred because he had inherited it. I felt the opportunity to help others in a more meaningful way had been missed so l was a bit disappointed, it felt like the real reason behind the need to ‘winter’ was concealed. That said it is a book that has stayed in my mind since l finished it.
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I'm only half way through this book, and accidentally stumbled across it . I'm going through a really difficult time in my life and this book feels like a warm fluffy blanket , safety, a tonic for the mind and heart. I don't want it to end , but it certainly is giving me much comfort on my darkest wintering days.
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Too many Words to say things, with an over complicated writing style
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Katherine does a beautiful job of bringing out the tools one should harbour in one’s arsenal to weather difficult times. It’s a lovely, languid read, one that I would like to come back to.
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Katherine May, par le prisme de sa propre expérience, nous parle des hivers de nos vies, que ce soit le saison qui revient tous les ans, ou les périodes difficiles que nous traversons à un moment ou à un autre... J'ai adoré ce livre. Pourtant, il m'est difficile de dire pourquoi. C'est un texte sans prétention, qui n'a rien d'extraordinaire ou de révolutionnaire en soi et pourtant sa magie opère, la magie des petits riens réconfortants, de la compréhension et des sentiments partagés. Depuis quelques années, j'aime de plus en plus l'hiver, son côté enrobant, le temps qui ralentit, le froid qui nous saisit et j'ai apprécié de retrouver tout cela ici. D'un autre côté, je pourrais le conseiller sans hésiter à tous ceux qui, justement, n'aiment pas cette saison, avec l'espoir que ce texte leur apporte un peu de lumière au coeur de cette période sombre, que ce soit au sens propre ou au sens figuré. Et Katherine May ne se contente pas de nous parler d'elle, son propos est universel, varié, interessant. J'ai été touchée, je me suis reconnue, projetée et je ne pouvais pas le lire à un meilleur moment. Vraiment, c'est amusant de constater qu'un texte si simple puisse être en même temps si puissant, j'ai même fait traîner ma lecture parce que je ne voulais pas le terminer.
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I found comfort in this book. It is not mentioned, but for me it is about autistic burnout and the lead-up to this desolate state of being. So many of the experiences could have been my own, and I found the struggles depicted highly relatable, for example the lifelong but fruitless attempts to get help from mental health professionals. Seeing another person put into words what I find almost impossible to explain to people who have no lived experience of autistic burnout was very validating for me and makes me feel seen.
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Un argomento interessante che di certo tutti noi affrontiamo almeno una volta nella vita, ma scritto nello stile di un diario personale. Sicuramente non uno dei libri che non riesci a mettere giù una volta iniziati.
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