One Good Thing: A Living Memoir

by M.A.C. Farrant

One Good Thing is a charming collision of memoir with the living, exuberant, and vulnerable natural world. Written in sixty-four short epistolary chapters, M.A.C. Farrant’s latest offering represents a search for hope and appeasement in a rapidly changing and often perplexing society. One Good Thing is also an homage to gardening columnist extraordinaire Helen Chesnut of Victoria’s Times Colonist , each section of the book focusing and expanding on one of her gardening columns.

Using a familiar “Dear Helen” structure, almost every piece in One Good Thing intimately and playfully relates to the gardening article that gave rise to it while simultaneously ranging into myriad other topics, including the author’s creative practice, personal and familial details, and comic riffs on a number of close-to-the-heart themes. With a mindful persistence that’s often hilarious, the book strives to find personal “calm abidance” through the practice of gardening as mediated by the universal and personal practice of writing.

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

Published March 30, 2021

About the author

Full name: Marion A.C. Farrant.

Reviews

[Jennifer Rowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this tiny book! Each of the short epistolary chapters is a response to the light-hearted and practical west coast gardening advice provided by Helen Chestnut in her Victoria "Times Colonist"gardening column. Reflections on life, friendships, family, aging, neighbours and the climate crisis through the lens of a writer whose observations are always poetic and thoughtful.

[Vontel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, quite enjoying it. Highly recommend it. Read a few short reflective chapters before bed most evenings. First book I've read by this North Saanich author; in this one, at least nominally, writing to the gardening columnist of the Victoria Tines-Colonist newspaper.