Catherine Newman

Every year 54 year-old Rachel ‘Rocky’ and her family spend a week of the Summer in a rented cottage at Cape Cod. This year that includes her husband Nick, her adult children – daughter Willa, son Jamie and his girlfriend Maya, and her elderly parents.

““It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,” the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “But also so terrible and ridiculous.” And maybe it’s all three. This one week.”

Sandwich is a realistic portrayal of show more a woman facing the challenges of midlife- menopause, empty nest syndrome, and unwell ageing parents. While Rocky savours the time she is spending with her family in the present, fuelled by the vagaries of fluctuating hormones she wistfully recalls the past and worries about the future.

Given I share in Rocky’s stage of life I found her easy to relate to. She’s angrier than me, but I’m familiar with many of her thoughts and emotions (and menopause symptoms). I enjoyed the candid nature of the narrative, Rocky is brash but also vulnerable, she made me laugh, and nearly weep.

Newman addresses several issues in Sandwich including parenthood, marriage, health, ageing, grief, and regret. And as the family laugh, bicker, reminisce, make confessions, while gorging on saltwater taffy, seafood and sandwiches, Newman highlights the powerful and enduring nature of love.

I devoured Sandwich. Insightful, witty and poignant, this is an excellent read that I recommend to other women of a certain (r)age. show less

The title of this charming novel could refer to either the generation, the town on the Cape, or both. The family tale of one summer week with parents, grandparents, and grown children is told hilariously and ruefully by Rocky (Rachel), wife of Nicky and mom to Jamie and Willa. The grown kids are almost too good to be true, and Rocky herself is the weakest link, being right in the depths of menopause. The humor is laugh-out-loud, but Rocky herself is prone to constant tears and to doubts show more about Nicky's ability to distance himself from all the logistics, as she's thankful for his steadiness. There's a small secret about pregnancy that is almost eclipsed in importance by another pregnancy. There's the obvious appreciation for the Cape's kettle ponds, beaches, ice cream stands, and the comfortable week at the same worn out, cramped rental. I could not wait to fall into bed over two nights of reading and just luxuriate in the pleasure of the story. show less

Savage, laugh-till-you-cry humor about family vacations, menopause, and secrets, SANDWICH takes place over the course of a week on Cape Cod: parents Rachel (Rocky, the narrator) and Nick, adult children Jamie and Willa, Jamie's longtime girlfriend Maya, and, for two days of the week, Rocky's parents all together in the same small house they've been coming to for twenty years.

CW: miscarriage, abortion

Quotes

We both have plantar fasciitis, a punishment for years of mocking all the special foot show more remedies in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue. (55)

We call this style of childhood nostalgia the catalogue of grievances. (62)

Despair laced through with so much incredible beauty. We just keep showing up for each other. Even through the mystery of other people's grief. What else is there? (107)

I cry a little then, because of the conversation and the wine and this absolute devastation and blessedness, rolled up into a lump in my own throat that I have been trying to swallow for my whole life. (121)

The children's features shattered me a little bit - as if someone had siphoned love out of me and tattooed it onto someone else's face. (144)

...her genetic inheritance includes scolding the people you're worried about. (149)

Or it's just your heart losing its mind. (209)

You're supposed to retrace your steps when you lose something, but none of my losses are like that. Where would I look for them? And what would I do if I found them? (214)

I've heard grief described as love with nowhere to go. To be honest, though, I sometimes feel like love is that already. (218)

There are so many ways to lose our children, and I have imagined most of them - imagined the near ecstasy of it, the violins sawing out grief's unfathomable song. (220; reminds me of Maggie Smith)

Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it's love expanding. I don't know. I just know you can't create loss to preempt loss because it doesn't work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. (221) show less

Three years on from the events of SANDWICH, Rocky, her husband Nick, and their daughter Willa are back in Western Massachusetts; son Jamie and his wife Maya are in New York. Rocky's dad is living with Rocky's family in the in-law apartment, wandering in and out of their kitchen in search of coffee, asking if it's all right if he keeps his shoes on. Rocky is doubly afflicted: wholly absorbed in the local tragedy of a former classmate of Jamie's killed by a train, and by a mysterious rash show more spreading across her body, mystifying doctor after doctor. Life, on the page.

Once again, I laughed till I cried (p.59), and all of it, all of it felt so real.

Quotes

I don't know why all our tender feelings have to masquerade as news. (15)

The enormity of my love for these tender, fleshly beings was twinned with a potential for loss so unimaginably deep and powerful that it was like a black hole lurking just outside our window. (18)

My besottedness with [Willa] feels like a gift or an affliction or both. (50)

You don't yet know who you'll become. (56)

"Mom, are you even listening to me? It honestly looks like you're one hundred percent occupied with picking croissant flakes off of your chest and eating them." (59)

The way [his mother] was entirely made from sorrow now, dragging her body around not because she was attached to the idea of life but simply because she couldn't shake it. (76)

There's good news and bad news, it seems, but I'm not entirely sure which is which. (113)

But have we mistaken Jamie's good nature for goodness? (141)

"Cheer up - it might never happen!" my own mum said, Britishly, if you were glum. But then, sometimes, it did happen. It does. Sometimes it's an accident: a single moment slicing your world in half to create a before and an after. (171)

How can she not be here? Grief is like the sound of the exhaust fan over the stove - a constant hum that recedes a little to the background over time, though you never get to turn it off. (182)

But ever individual question was really a version of the same existential one: People are different from me. How do I survive it? (194)

The lump in my throat was part sorrow and part gratitude. Maybe that's what it always is, and we just forget to notice how lucky we are because we're so busy choking and trying not to cry. (208) show less