While coping with her mother's untimely death, writer Ann Hood read British women writers — and she cooked. And knitted. Credit: via Writers in Paradise

While coping with her mother’s untimely death, writer Ann Hood read British women writers — and she cooked. And knitted. Credit: via Writers in Paradise
This year I've surrounded myself with British and Irish women. In February my 86-year-old mother, Gogo, died unexpectedly and ever since I've escaped — even hidden — into the arms of these women. More accurately, into their words and pages. I can’t explain why it’s these women across the pond who've brought me comfort. But their winding roads and country houses, London apartments and post-war love affairs, tangled families and buried secrets have kept me company when I missed my mom and given me harbor on sleepless nights.

I start at the beginning and read every novel the author's written. If you don’t need to lose yourself in quite so many books, just read everything Jane Gardam wrote. Years ago, my friend, writer Lily King, gushed about Gardam’s novel Old Filth, about the life of Edward Feathers, from his childhood in Malay to his days as a lawyer in Hong Kong to his final days in Dorset. It's full of shipwrecks and love and widowhood and betrayal and abandonment and old enemies and friends and stodgy men’s clubs in London. Lily was right to gush; it’s a masterpiece.

No surprise then that when I began my Year of British Women Writers I would see if Jane Gardam had written anything else. To my utter delight, she had. Lots. started with the two novels in the The Old Filth Trilogy — and my great joy that there was a trilogy that followed the lives of Edward Feathers’s wife and his enemy cannot even begin to be expressed here. I gobbled up The Man In The Wooden Hat and Last Friends, and so should you. Read this trilogy of young love and old age and well, the human condition.

Then, move on to Gardam’s other novels, The Flight of the Maidens, Crusoe’s Daughter, and A Long Way From Verona. Eventually, I moved on to Tessa Hadley, then Ann Enright, Maggie O’Farrell and Anita Brookner, happily reading my way through their complete works.

After you fall in love with these writers, you too can read all of their books, enough to get you through a year of sadness, or an around the world trip, or really, a lifetime. While reading Gardam and Hadley and Enright and O’Farrell and Brookner, I did the other things that comfort me. I knit baby hats and fingerless mitts and complicated cowls. And I cooked. I cooked like I had to stock up for a possible catastrophe (because, of course, I’d just suffered one). I made Gogo’s spaghetti and meatballs, my father’s homemade mac and cheese, lots of tortellini en brodo, which is really just tortellini cooked in homemade chicken stock (so I also had to roast a lot of chickens). Those recipes and more are collected along with my essays in my new book, Kitchen Yarns: Notes On Love, Life, and Food.

Read. Knit. Cook. Repeat.

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This article appears in Dec 13-20, 2018.