I had read a couple books by Ann Patchett before this, and I remember enjoying them, but not loving them. So this book wasn’t at the top of my to-read list, but everyone kept raving about how good it was, so I went ahead and requested the audiobook from my library. It took forever to come in, but since I wasn’t dying to listen to it, I didn’t care about the wait.
This book was so good!
First of all, the audiobook is narrated by Meryl Streep, so that automatically makes it amazing.
The book itself is also lovely.
The narrator is a woman telling her three grown daughters the story of how she dated a famous actor back in the day before he was famous.
Now that I write it out, it sounds stupid, but I promise it’s not. The family live on a cherry farm in Michigan. Farms run on notoriously slim margins, but they’ve managed to make a living off their farm so far, although they’re starting to come to grips with the fact that they’re not sure how much longer they can keep that up with climate change getting worse and worse every year.
The oldest daughter has decided to continue living on the farm and take care of it with her parents, and eventually take it over when they’re ready to retire.
The other two girls are in college and vet school, but it’s the summer of 2020 so they have all come back to the farm to hunker down and to help their parents pick all the cherries before they go bad. They have a very limited window of opportunity in which to pick all the sweet cherries, then they have to pick all the tart cherries, and then it’s on to apples.
Lara (the narrator) is understandably torn between loving getting to spend all this time with all three of her daughters while also feeling kind of guilty that she’s enjoying this time when so many people are dying and so many others are struggling to get through the pandemic.
One evening they’re watching a movie to unwind and Lara’s husband mentions to the girls that their mother dated the starring actor before he was famous. So of course they have to hear all about it.
The story takes Lara a few days to tell because she has to start with how she got started as an actor and how that led to her acting in a small summer theater in a place in Michigan called Tom Lake.
Her youngest daughter wants to be an actress and cannot believe her mom was a legit movie star and chose to give it all up. Honestly, I probably would have had the same reaction when I wanted to be an actress.
But Lara never wanted to be a movie star, and it turned out she was only good at playing one role, and it was a role she would age out of.
Then again, Michael Cera has said he can’t act, he just plays himself, and he has still managed to make an entire career out of it.
Something that stuck with me was when she talked about watching the auditions as these girls acted their butts off and she thought it was all so overblown. She knew she just had to get up there, say the lines, and not get in the way.
Honestly, that kind of changed how I think about acting. I happened to be watching Studio 60 at the same time I was reading this book, and I think it’s definitely true of an Aaron Sorkin script that all you have to do is not get in the way.
I don’t mean to minimize the incredible talent of the actors, but I also heard Amber Benson say something similar about being on Buffy. She said sometimes you have to put in a lot of effort to make the script work, but when you’re working with a writer as good as Joss Whedon, you just have to say the line and it comes out beautifully.
Anyhoo, I’m not going to sum up Lara’s entire relationship with Duke because it really was just a summer fling, and I don’t think that’s really what this book is about. I think it’s about discovering who your mom was before she became your mom, and that’s what I thought was really lovely about the book.
I was listening to an interview with Patchett in which the interviewer mentioned that the book touches on the pandemic, race, and a woman’s right to choose, but it’s not about any of those things. Those are just elements that come and go in the course of the story, much like they do in real life. You deal with these things, and then you move onto dealing with other stuff.
It’s so good, and of course Meryl Streep does a fantastic job narrating the audiobook, so if you haven’t read this one yet, I highly recommend you do.