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Pig Years
This captivating memoir is a "startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals" (Anthony Doerr, best-selling author of All the Light We Cannot See), as an itinerant farmhand chronicles the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth.
Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as "engrossing" and "a marvel." As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and stark full moons, the sharp cold days lives near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter's dark descends, Pig Ears draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter.
In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux.
Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as "engrossing" and "a marvel." As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and stark full moons, the sharp cold days lives near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter's dark descends, Pig Ears draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter.
In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published June 14, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews
June 10, 2022
This was honestly very difficult for me to read. As a super sensitive vegan, this absolutely threw me into some hard feelings. I most definitely cried multiple times. I thought the book was written beautifully, and I loved the emotion the author put into it. I enjoyed her journey being shared. I would totally recommend it, but beware if you are sensitive with animals. In truth though, we all should know the cycle of our food from farm to table.
June 25, 2022
Okay farming memoirs are 100% my guilty pleasure. This one I would say the writing was trying too hard to be literary. Some good procedural bits which are my favorite parts, lots of chicken slaughter and I want more more day in the life farming admin. But I wasn’t so sure about the scope of this one. Seemed like she choose four random years she was a farm hand to recount but I wasn’t sure why these years.
July 22, 2022
This is first person, contemporary account of life on small farms in Vermont and western New York. The narrative has long, flowery descriptions and generally uninteresting musings. Several humans interact with the narrator, but they, like the narrator, lack any distinguishing characteristics other than, in some instances, a name and/or a few physical traits. Action, even when the narrator is the one doing the action, it is presented in the muted tone of an observer rather than a participant. There is no overriding plot, just a series of events.
September 12, 2022
Ms. Gaydos celebrates the joys of farming the old fashioned way in contemporary New England. It's not agribuisness conglomarates raising 10,000 chickens at a time or tractors guided by GPS plowing razor edge straight furrows on 2000 acre farms. It's small scale truck farming in Vermont and upstate New York, with small flocks of chickens and turkeys, a few pigs and a lot of hand tended vegetables. It all happens in a place with a short growing season not known for the fertility of its soil on a farm so small that you'd think it couldn't possibly be economical. And it's not like classic American family farming of the kind celebrated by Wendall Berry and practiced by my grandparents on our family farm in Kentucky. The farmers of Pig Years aren't people close to the land whose families have been rooted on the same property for generations. They are young people who rent the land they farm, who don't come from farming families and who consciously choose to engage in artisinal farming because they love it. According to the jacket copy, Ms Gaydos attended Hampshire College and Columbia University, elite schools that last time I checked didn't have Ag colleges, but she chooses to be a minimum wage farm laborer because she finds a deep connection to her soul in farming.
There are some major contradictions in this life that Ms. Gaydos does not shy away from - The farm brings her close to nature with moments of great beauty, with bears, deer, foxes, woodchucks and many varieties of birds. But the farmer's job is to struggle against nature with traps and guns and poisons to wrest the bounty from the soil. There is a deep affection for the livestock, who are of course raised only to be butchered and eaten in a ballet of life and death. It's simultaneously beautiful and repellent. Dirt is everywhere, as dust and mud, the soil that allows everything to grow, but also the filth that no amount of bathing can fully wash away. There is a lot of poverty, drinking and drug abuse. It's not a high brow life style, but they all seem to read and Ms. Gaydos is certainly a talented writer. No matter how poor the pay may be, there is a deep sense of spiritual fulfillment that suffuses every page of this book.
There are some major contradictions in this life that Ms. Gaydos does not shy away from - The farm brings her close to nature with moments of great beauty, with bears, deer, foxes, woodchucks and many varieties of birds. But the farmer's job is to struggle against nature with traps and guns and poisons to wrest the bounty from the soil. There is a deep affection for the livestock, who are of course raised only to be butchered and eaten in a ballet of life and death. It's simultaneously beautiful and repellent. Dirt is everywhere, as dust and mud, the soil that allows everything to grow, but also the filth that no amount of bathing can fully wash away. There is a lot of poverty, drinking and drug abuse. It's not a high brow life style, but they all seem to read and Ms. Gaydos is certainly a talented writer. No matter how poor the pay may be, there is a deep sense of spiritual fulfillment that suffuses every page of this book.
November 18, 2022
PIG YEARS
Ellyn Gaydos
What a strange book! I live on a small farm, but because it is small don't think that it doesn't have work. Today I cleared the fence line and put up a section of the fence, tomorrow I will do the same again only further down. Last week I took off my shirt in a field to clean and wrap a newborn baby goat that I pulled in a breach birth. I worked on that baby for 2 hours and she lived 5 days because I willed her to and then I had to put her down because she wasn't going to have a normal goat life. Farm life isn't for everyone, but it is for some of us. I sold two goats this week, yeah for me! It means that my profit line crept above the loss line and I can pay the vet because I was too involved with the goat to do it myself. But I gave most of it to a farmhand I hired... wonder if he will write a book?
I appreciated the farming in New York, God it must be terrible with the short growing season and extreme cold. I understand the "knife edge between loss and gain"... I feel it all the time and have a full-time job to offset it. I love that the author is/was a seasonal hand and loved the work, what will we do when there are no more family farms? Part of America will be lost.
I am not a fan of pigs, they are rather creepy animals to me, but I appreciate any short gestation animal and I liked how they were a symbol of hope and motherhood.
I borrow this statement from the book jacket as I don't think I can say it any better:
In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux....
4 star reading
Happy Reading!
Ellyn Gaydos
What a strange book! I live on a small farm, but because it is small don't think that it doesn't have work. Today I cleared the fence line and put up a section of the fence, tomorrow I will do the same again only further down. Last week I took off my shirt in a field to clean and wrap a newborn baby goat that I pulled in a breach birth. I worked on that baby for 2 hours and she lived 5 days because I willed her to and then I had to put her down because she wasn't going to have a normal goat life. Farm life isn't for everyone, but it is for some of us. I sold two goats this week, yeah for me! It means that my profit line crept above the loss line and I can pay the vet because I was too involved with the goat to do it myself. But I gave most of it to a farmhand I hired... wonder if he will write a book?
I appreciated the farming in New York, God it must be terrible with the short growing season and extreme cold. I understand the "knife edge between loss and gain"... I feel it all the time and have a full-time job to offset it. I love that the author is/was a seasonal hand and loved the work, what will we do when there are no more family farms? Part of America will be lost.
I am not a fan of pigs, they are rather creepy animals to me, but I appreciate any short gestation animal and I liked how they were a symbol of hope and motherhood.
I borrow this statement from the book jacket as I don't think I can say it any better:
In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux....
4 star reading
Happy Reading!
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July 8, 2022
The Pig Years was a unique read that is not for the faint of heart. I thought I had a good idea of what farm life was like, but then The Pig Years came along and smacked me back to reality.
I wouldn’t describe this book as a fast read but I did find it to be an enjoyable read. It is truly like nothing else I have ever read before and the journey Sarah took kept me wanting to know more and more.
If you’re of the mind that animals are pets and not food, I can’t recommend this book because the writing is graphic. However, if you can look past that, then I think it’s a worthwhile read.
I wouldn’t describe this book as a fast read but I did find it to be an enjoyable read. It is truly like nothing else I have ever read before and the journey Sarah took kept me wanting to know more and more.
If you’re of the mind that animals are pets and not food, I can’t recommend this book because the writing is graphic. However, if you can look past that, then I think it’s a worthwhile read.
July 17, 2022
I am not impressed. I was hoping the writing would be as magical as all the reviews...but the author's tone is overall...bored. So many opportunities to describe her unique farming experiences fall flat.
March 26, 2023
When I picked this book from my library’s shelves I was not expecting to be utterly transported to a rich world of farming and shown the beauty in both life and death. Be warned, many parts of this book depict, in great detail, what goes into the agricultural lifestyle, including slaughtering animals. Gaydos does an incredible job though showing her readers how even this can be a beautiful thing. Life grows alongside death.
August 31, 2022
Ms. Gaydos is a fabulous writer who gives the reader an in-depth look at what it is like to work (as a laborer) on small farms in Vt. She writes beautifully about the challenges and hardships of working such farms, like picking off tomato bugs for hours, chasing after loose farm animals and dealing with old, finicky machines. I can’t understand why some chose to give it lower ratings. I think the writer was honest—without yielding to the “mystic” of farming.
July 10, 2022
Near the beginning of her memoir, PIG YEARS, Ellyn Gaydos admits that she’s sort of inexplicably drawn to two things: working on farms and writing. “This story started as notes I was taking on pigs, but if I was going to write about pigs I’d have to write about the moon too and the wild creatures at the perimeters of the pig pens and eventually my eye would follow the bees into flowers; all of it connected.” She points out that she did not grow up in a farming family but has found herself drawn to the life; likewise, she’s always been subtly embarrassed to admit her desire to write. Here, fortuitously, she manages to combine the two and make all of us the richer for it.
PIG YEARS chronicles five years of Gaydos’ work as a farmhand on small farms in Vermont and New York, mostly raising vegetables for eventual sale at farmers’ markets, local vendors and to CSA members. Her status as a farmhand (rather than as a farmer and landowner) gives her a sort of freedom. Sure, she works hard, she’s not paid particularly well (on a trip into town, she notes that fast food and retail employees earn higher hourly wages than she does), and her accommodations are humble at best and pretty filthy at worst. However, she is able to move to a different farm for the next season if her desire leads her there. Since her personal livelihood is not tied to the success or failure of any one farm, she is free to ignore, more or less, the business side of agriculture and instead focus on the urgent day-to-day matters.
These moments of close observation and reflection are what make up the bulk of this memorable book. Some of the descriptions are surprising, even transcendent (“I lift a sleeping bird and hold it in my hand; its warm heart beats fiercely through downy feathers like the controlled measure of a medicine dropper”). Others are, in a matter-of-fact way, grisly --- such as a detailed account of hog slaughtering and butchering for which readers need to be prepared.
Gaydos is always attuned to the cyclical nature of her work and the larger cycles of life and death as they play out annually on the farm. The pigs and other creatures have her affection, to be sure, but human concerns also recur throughout these pages --- in terms of her portrayal of townspeople, fellow farm workers and others, as well as regular appearances by her boyfriend, Graham, an NYC-based artist who is clearly fond of her, even if he’s at best indifferent to farming. Gaydos longs to have a child with him, which also plays into the cyclical nature of her writing.
For a book rooted in such earthy, visceral matters (in addition to the scenes of slaughter and butchery, there’s an indelible description of pig sex), PIG YEARS does have a periodic tendency to be overwritten, relying a bit too heavily on figurative language and seeming too self-conscious at times. That said, Gaydos’ account is thoughtful and compelling, a much-needed introduction for many readers to a story of seasonal growth and decline that is invisible to most of us but essential to everyone.
Reviewed by Norah Piehl
PIG YEARS chronicles five years of Gaydos’ work as a farmhand on small farms in Vermont and New York, mostly raising vegetables for eventual sale at farmers’ markets, local vendors and to CSA members. Her status as a farmhand (rather than as a farmer and landowner) gives her a sort of freedom. Sure, she works hard, she’s not paid particularly well (on a trip into town, she notes that fast food and retail employees earn higher hourly wages than she does), and her accommodations are humble at best and pretty filthy at worst. However, she is able to move to a different farm for the next season if her desire leads her there. Since her personal livelihood is not tied to the success or failure of any one farm, she is free to ignore, more or less, the business side of agriculture and instead focus on the urgent day-to-day matters.
These moments of close observation and reflection are what make up the bulk of this memorable book. Some of the descriptions are surprising, even transcendent (“I lift a sleeping bird and hold it in my hand; its warm heart beats fiercely through downy feathers like the controlled measure of a medicine dropper”). Others are, in a matter-of-fact way, grisly --- such as a detailed account of hog slaughtering and butchering for which readers need to be prepared.
Gaydos is always attuned to the cyclical nature of her work and the larger cycles of life and death as they play out annually on the farm. The pigs and other creatures have her affection, to be sure, but human concerns also recur throughout these pages --- in terms of her portrayal of townspeople, fellow farm workers and others, as well as regular appearances by her boyfriend, Graham, an NYC-based artist who is clearly fond of her, even if he’s at best indifferent to farming. Gaydos longs to have a child with him, which also plays into the cyclical nature of her writing.
For a book rooted in such earthy, visceral matters (in addition to the scenes of slaughter and butchery, there’s an indelible description of pig sex), PIG YEARS does have a periodic tendency to be overwritten, relying a bit too heavily on figurative language and seeming too self-conscious at times. That said, Gaydos’ account is thoughtful and compelling, a much-needed introduction for many readers to a story of seasonal growth and decline that is invisible to most of us but essential to everyone.
Reviewed by Norah Piehl
July 25, 2022
I will say first off that as a vegetarian some of the animal parts are unsettling. I haven’t been a vegetarian my whole life, and plenty of critters are displaced or accidentally killed planting vegetables, so I read on.
About one pig she writes: ”Sister lies alone in dappled sunlight, her eyes closed. Projected around her is the green canopy, lit from above, a gilded ornament to her death. She was my favorite. She died with an instinctual knack for this, as for other parts of life.”
Gaydos writes with so much detail that you feel and smell and taste it all. You really get a sense of her true love of farming. It made me crave a life this full.
About one pig she writes: ”Sister lies alone in dappled sunlight, her eyes closed. Projected around her is the green canopy, lit from above, a gilded ornament to her death. She was my favorite. She died with an instinctual knack for this, as for other parts of life.”
Gaydos writes with so much detail that you feel and smell and taste it all. You really get a sense of her true love of farming. It made me crave a life this full.
June 3, 2023
This is a beautifully written book. It’s not a typical life-on-the farm memoir, but rather a more poetic collection of sketches about farming, nature, the cycle of life and death, rebirth and loss, life in all its harshness and beautyand gore. I listened to the audio book with authors narration, and thoroughly enjoyed every minute.
April 27, 2025
Wow I’m familiar with how hard farming is but this brought it to another level. Beautifully written and poetic, this book transports you to the hilly farms of Vermont. Farming is rich in life and death. Well worth the read
November 16, 2022
Gave me the feeling of what it's like to exist in independent agriculture and the journey for that next thing after college.
July 27, 2023
Surprised me how much I enjoyed this book. What a beautiful tiny life. So much about fecundity and death but especially death.
September 4, 2022
3.5. I love memoirs and this was definitely insight into a world/way of life that I know very little about. I liked Gaydos' writing and descriptions but I feel like there was just something missing that would take it to the next level for me personally.
July 1, 2022
Pig Years is a very powerful book about farming and the necessities farmers must do in order to feed their families and the world. The author put a lot of emotion into this story and it definitely tugs at the heartstrings. Very well written.
August 4, 2022
I really really wanted to like this book. And often I did. The description of the dirty and often bloody aspects of farming are a welcome antidote to the privilege of santitized purity food culture. But this author tried so hard to be the next Annie Dillard that her sometimes overwritten and even purple prose verged on plagiarism. The description of the spider for example is too close to a scene from Dillard's Holy the Firm to be coincidental (or ethical.) The author's antipathy towards religion and especially Catholicism is obvious throughout and this is really where the book fails and where Gados misunderstands Dillard. This author's atheism is deeply Protestant at its core, where Dillard is able to see the sacramentality in the cycle of life and death, Gados is not, and we are left with a grim materialism. I hate to be harsh but when an author is this convinced of her own genius, it's a distraction.
July 20, 2022
This was not a pleasant read. Having done fieldwork in my distant youth, I know its potential for both exhaustion and communion, but this memoir portrays a grim, doomed worklife without reflection or analysis. Gaydos' portraits of her pigs in particular are grotesque (she repeatedly details the "hard brown plaque in their ears"), and she includes oddly personal details about her coworkers. With its vivid depictions of grinding poverty and animal deaths, Pig Years feels more dystopian than agrarian.
August 20, 2022
Like many other reviewers, I found this memoir of farming life in the Northeast very hard to digest. The detailed descriptions of everyday hardships were more off-putting than intriguing. Everyone seems exhausted, financially depleted, dehydrated and hungry. It's amazing they have the energy for music and books and playing pool. And I just hated the lengthy descriptions of killing and butchering pigs who have the same intelligence (as far as I know) as my corgis. I have tremendous respect for farmers and others who do hard, physical work but I didn't enjoy this memoir about it.
May 10, 2022
Just lovely and poignant and honest about love, nurturing, and the sometimes necessary brutality that we commit for the sake of feeding ourselves. It reminded me a lot of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I would love to see what Gaydos comes out with next.
July 29, 2022
I usually like farm stories but this one is just plain boring. Way too many words and the narrative is not engaging.
August 8, 2022
I was very excited for this book based on reviews but I just found it impossible to get into & enjoy. The author’s tone is bored and lackluster.
September 15, 2022
A reminder of the relationships held by the farmer. The farmer and the eater, the farmer and the animal, the farmer and the earth.
July 30, 2022
I echo a previous review that warns that this is a book not for the feint of heart. The friendliness of Charlotte's Web's Wilber will not get him anywhere. Pigs are not pets. Neither are chickens. When they outlive their usefulness, they become dinner. But, that is the reality of life on the farm. Ask any 4H exhibitor at a county fair.
It is wonderful, however, to read about the seasons on the farm, the planting, weeding, reaping. One big cycle that gives momentary rest. This book makes you appreciate the proprietors at the farmers markets so much more.
The author does have a wonderful ways with words (the ones describing the pig and chicken slaughter aside. They are vivid.). Take these passages describing the local swimming quarry, and the places the stone ends up.
---------------------
"On the Fourth of July, boys with buzz cuts drop from the rocks that ring the old granite quarry, release themselves into a free fall, and disappear into chalk-blue water. Their momentum continues and they sink fast. The colors of their flesh radiate against turquoise water that fills the man-made concavity. Cables of twisted red steel hang from the woods surrounding the quarry and sink into the water. Wooden ladders, long abandoned by the quarrymen, remain lashed to rock like barnacles. This quarry appears to be rounded, but really is made up of squared pillars of rock stained white and black where large rectangles were cut away in vertical chunks. There are pine trees and a crane in the distance, plunging into a further, still-operating quarry.
Swimming past the threshold of the first quarry into the second abandoned hole, the deep water is cool. It is like swimming in hard crystal; only skimming the top of a strange kind of portal to a deeper part of the earth, one feels the newfound absence of rock. The white-brown bodies of people and the mud-colored fish look auroral swimming through the sky-blue water. The pools are the inverse of rocks where buildings and tombstones were scraped out, the negative monument. Being in this place where things are mined out, vegetables grown, cows milked, and most of it trucked away is being close to a store of fertility, fertility for life led elsewhere. In this way the countryside, flanked by empty storefronts and abandoned mills, contains riches. Rivers of milk, fields of Christmas trees, veins of granite, gallon upon gallon of sap turned to syrup. But it does not insulate from poverty. Though money is exchanged, it is perhaps at a loss. Beyond the obvious cavities in the ground, so much of what is taken or sold is a depletion.
.....
In the town cemetery all the stones are carved out of the same white-gray granite from the local quarries. Here, where an average family could afford an opulent grave marker from rock common as dirt, there are six thousand graves. Columns with smiley faces on the tops--round and beaming gray. A race car, a soccer ball, a mandolin, deer running free, an eighteen-wheeler, an airplane, an easy chair. There's a mechanic with a wrench carved into his back pocket, and a pack of cigarettes in his front, two rosebuds for his dead children and four leaves for the living. There is a soldier with his wife chiseled into the smoke of his cigarette and a couple propped up in bed holding hands. In the dirt near their shared grave sits a small stone for the man's second wife, after this one died. There are so many large and disembodied hands they must be the hands of God. There are hands in prayer and hands clasped together, hands wrapped around stone-colored lilies. One pair of hands grasps a white catfish between them, h9olding on to the wet slipperiness of life itself."
--------------------------
The author's word pictures are amazing.
It is wonderful, however, to read about the seasons on the farm, the planting, weeding, reaping. One big cycle that gives momentary rest. This book makes you appreciate the proprietors at the farmers markets so much more.
The author does have a wonderful ways with words (the ones describing the pig and chicken slaughter aside. They are vivid.). Take these passages describing the local swimming quarry, and the places the stone ends up.
---------------------
"On the Fourth of July, boys with buzz cuts drop from the rocks that ring the old granite quarry, release themselves into a free fall, and disappear into chalk-blue water. Their momentum continues and they sink fast. The colors of their flesh radiate against turquoise water that fills the man-made concavity. Cables of twisted red steel hang from the woods surrounding the quarry and sink into the water. Wooden ladders, long abandoned by the quarrymen, remain lashed to rock like barnacles. This quarry appears to be rounded, but really is made up of squared pillars of rock stained white and black where large rectangles were cut away in vertical chunks. There are pine trees and a crane in the distance, plunging into a further, still-operating quarry.
Swimming past the threshold of the first quarry into the second abandoned hole, the deep water is cool. It is like swimming in hard crystal; only skimming the top of a strange kind of portal to a deeper part of the earth, one feels the newfound absence of rock. The white-brown bodies of people and the mud-colored fish look auroral swimming through the sky-blue water. The pools are the inverse of rocks where buildings and tombstones were scraped out, the negative monument. Being in this place where things are mined out, vegetables grown, cows milked, and most of it trucked away is being close to a store of fertility, fertility for life led elsewhere. In this way the countryside, flanked by empty storefronts and abandoned mills, contains riches. Rivers of milk, fields of Christmas trees, veins of granite, gallon upon gallon of sap turned to syrup. But it does not insulate from poverty. Though money is exchanged, it is perhaps at a loss. Beyond the obvious cavities in the ground, so much of what is taken or sold is a depletion.
.....
In the town cemetery all the stones are carved out of the same white-gray granite from the local quarries. Here, where an average family could afford an opulent grave marker from rock common as dirt, there are six thousand graves. Columns with smiley faces on the tops--round and beaming gray. A race car, a soccer ball, a mandolin, deer running free, an eighteen-wheeler, an airplane, an easy chair. There's a mechanic with a wrench carved into his back pocket, and a pack of cigarettes in his front, two rosebuds for his dead children and four leaves for the living. There is a soldier with his wife chiseled into the smoke of his cigarette and a couple propped up in bed holding hands. In the dirt near their shared grave sits a small stone for the man's second wife, after this one died. There are so many large and disembodied hands they must be the hands of God. There are hands in prayer and hands clasped together, hands wrapped around stone-colored lilies. One pair of hands grasps a white catfish between them, h9olding on to the wet slipperiness of life itself."
--------------------------
The author's word pictures are amazing.
November 27, 2023
Before I even began, I knew that reading this book would be difficult for me. I appreciate the poetic depiction of farm life but struggled to digest its cruel reality. It’s one thing to vaguely acknowledge that every piece of meat I eat was at one point a live, mobile (and probably cute) being. But I don’t have to REALLY think about it. I sear, sauté, and scramble mindlessly because in our culture, we don’t REALLY think about where it comes from. When I ate my bacon for breakfast this morning, I wasn’t picturing a piglet scurrying around with its friends, swishing it’s tail and exploring throughout its lifespan up until the point it was slaughtered for my consumption. And I definitely wasn’t considering the details of its death…was it painless? Quick? Did it understand what was going on in the moments just before? Maybe, for ethical reasons, I SHOULD think about where my food comes from and how it was raised and processed. A part of me felt some kind of responsibility to read and finish this book out of respect for the animals I consume on a daily basis. And I am thankful that the author explored even this reality of farm life.
To be fair, there were only a handful of morbid descriptions of animal death and meat processing, and I do believe the author narrated even these parts in the most respectful way possible. There is so much more to this book then just animals being raised and then killed. These were just the parts of the book that stood out most to me because of the emotional effect they had on my sensitive self. Gaydo enlightened me to many different parts of rural farm life, (including agricultural farming as well) and I appreciate the lyricism in which she did so. I am walking away from this writing with a better understanding of small scale animal and agricultural farming practices and the people that are a crucial part of these processes. This book, however, was not a “page turner” by any means and while I appreciated the work, I didn’t find myself especially excited to return to the reading and that is why I rated it 3 stars.
To be fair, there were only a handful of morbid descriptions of animal death and meat processing, and I do believe the author narrated even these parts in the most respectful way possible. There is so much more to this book then just animals being raised and then killed. These were just the parts of the book that stood out most to me because of the emotional effect they had on my sensitive self. Gaydo enlightened me to many different parts of rural farm life, (including agricultural farming as well) and I appreciate the lyricism in which she did so. I am walking away from this writing with a better understanding of small scale animal and agricultural farming practices and the people that are a crucial part of these processes. This book, however, was not a “page turner” by any means and while I appreciated the work, I didn’t find myself especially excited to return to the reading and that is why I rated it 3 stars.
August 19, 2022
I listened to the audiobook version (read by the author) and quite enjoyed the full 6 1/2 hours straight through. This is a memoir and farm/garden chronicle spanning several years, from 2017 to 2020, as author Ellyn Gaydos works as a farmhand and raises her own pigs. The beautiful, lyrical writing details the captivating nature of agricultural work - the sensitivity to the needs of plants and animals, the powerlessness over the forces of nature that make or break a growing season, life in rural agricultural communities in New York and Vermont, the quirks and charm of other farmhands and locals, and the fulfilling and heartbreaking moments of yield and loss. I was very impressed by the author's ability to balance her poetic and sensitive writing style with honest and often brutal descriptions of the farm-to-table cycle, particularly concerning the pigs she raised for slaughter. I appreciated how her love for her pigs, her dedication to them and her appreciation of their distinct personalities, coexisted with her ultimate purpose of slaughtering them and using their meat. I feel like the outside perspective of farming, especially when it concerns farm animals, is often lacking in the full scope of farmers' attitudes towards their animals. I loved how the author was able to show that it's possible to love and appreciate something that you will eventually consume - and, in a sense, that consumption can be the ultimate expression of one's appreciation.
As someone interested in farming, I really enjoyed this. The writing was beautiful and the content was interesting, and the author was able to tell her personal story - involving love, friendship, family, and her yearning to be a mother - within the story of her farms and pigs in a great concoction of various plotlines and imagery.
As someone interested in farming, I really enjoyed this. The writing was beautiful and the content was interesting, and the author was able to tell her personal story - involving love, friendship, family, and her yearning to be a mother - within the story of her farms and pigs in a great concoction of various plotlines and imagery.
February 15, 2024
I was seduced by the literary raves of this book and in my attempt to bulk up my narrative non-fiction I thought this would be an easy pick. Plus I lived not far from this farm for a couple years and could use a hit of nostalgia. There are passages in which Gaydos descriptions sing. I loved the intricate viscera of slaughtering animals and making sausage. But for the most part the content of the words - as opposed to the way in which they are chosen and strung together - is pretty boring. Is this a choice of the author to not overly romanticize and therefore tame farming life? Maybe but then bring to life for me what it was that drew you back to the farm year after year. There were interesting historical nods to the Shakers who farmed the area in previous generations referencing the timeless nature of what farmers do. And with the Shakers are other more contemporary references to religious communities (mostly - entirely?- Catholic) who imprint upon upstate NY. Yet while the physical Catholicism of the 2oth century working class immigrants dovetail with some of the bloody passages of the farm, I wanted more examination or perhaps a nod to a spiritualism of farm life and how it may differ from the Madonna shrine or the pleading to St. Jude. The same is true of the clear divide between the locals and the recent ivory tower transplants of Gaydos and a couple of her friends. Who are these people? Why do they do what they do? How do you examine your difference from them besides your desire to be seen as a local? Even Gaydos' friends were pretty two dimensional to be honest. Am I asking too much? Maybe its the literary nature of her writing that make me want more novelistic insight into the people in these pages. But I think nonfiction as a form can be up to the task.
July 31, 2022
Ellyn Gaydos seems to be a non-materialistic woman who cares about the earth and accepts the so-called "circle of life". I hesitated to listen but found it more interesting than distasteful --and many of her comments brought back memories and spoke to me. I liked her straight-forward writing and also her narration.
Like in the book, our chickens were prepared by my parents in a similar way to the book's descriptions, altho without a couple of the machines mentioned. I was long obsessed with the memory when very young of a headless chicken running around altho my dad tried to avoid that. I left that life behind when i moved away and got married, altho' i still long for it sometimes.
Her gardening is so impressive with the preparation, etc and sharing. My parents worked together on their acre garden and also shared! I have a friend who does that too. I only liked gathering up the potatoes as my dad dug them up by hand with a pitchfork --the machines described in the book required a lot of exact placement!
Her description of the several days-long pig-killing n arduous prep made me glad that my parents always hired a local meat processor to come to our place, dispatch and take away the corpses. (altho i do have bad memories of watching n listening to the killing from an upstairs window.) My dad would pick up neatly labeled frozen white wrapped pkgs of pork a few days later. (I would always ask if we were eating this year's or last year's pigs --my mom always assured me it was last year's!)
I looked for a biography or comments by the author as I'd like to know more about such an interesting and admirable person.
Overdrive @ 1.30 speed
Like in the book, our chickens were prepared by my parents in a similar way to the book's descriptions, altho without a couple of the machines mentioned. I was long obsessed with the memory when very young of a headless chicken running around altho my dad tried to avoid that. I left that life behind when i moved away and got married, altho' i still long for it sometimes.
Her gardening is so impressive with the preparation, etc and sharing. My parents worked together on their acre garden and also shared! I have a friend who does that too. I only liked gathering up the potatoes as my dad dug them up by hand with a pitchfork --the machines described in the book required a lot of exact placement!
Her description of the several days-long pig-killing n arduous prep made me glad that my parents always hired a local meat processor to come to our place, dispatch and take away the corpses. (altho i do have bad memories of watching n listening to the killing from an upstairs window.) My dad would pick up neatly labeled frozen white wrapped pkgs of pork a few days later. (I would always ask if we were eating this year's or last year's pigs --my mom always assured me it was last year's!)
I looked for a biography or comments by the author as I'd like to know more about such an interesting and admirable person.
Overdrive @ 1.30 speed
November 15, 2024
I really like farm musings and happened across this at Barnes & Noble, intrigued by the title and the cover art. I listened to the audiobook version from the library, read by the author. This is one of those books where it’s difficult to separate the book itself (the writing, the organization, etc.) from the subject matter because objectively it was well-written (except for some abrupt chapter endings), but the subject itself was suffused with a bleakness that made me feel more uncomfortable than not. While my 6.5 acre property is in the process of being turned into a regenerative permaculture farm, and I don’t have any real livestock experience beyond chickens, I haven’t experienced the kind of….hopelessness? That seems to be a central theme of this book, even subtly. I think it does a good job showing how difficult farming can be not just from the work itself, but for transient farm hands in depressed areas. This wasn’t an exposé on the hidden lives of seasonal workers, but it probably could be if the author partnered with a journalist.
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