Pig Years

By: Ellyn Gaydos

Narrated by: Ellyn Gaydos

Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2022 Ellyn Gaydos (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

“Gaydos describes in lyrical and unflinching detail the processes behind our food. . . . In Gaydos’s soft and honest delivery, the struggles and joys of life—plant, human, animal—come across as neither graphic nor gratuitous, but simply real.”—Sebastian Modak, The New York Times

“Evocative . . . Gaydos offers what, at first, reads like a straightforward catalogue of farm life. . . . But the tranquil simplicity belies a deeper purpose. . . . Our dominion over nature, it becomes clear, is incomplete.”—The New Yorker

“Gaydos brings her experience farming, in particular breeding animals for slaughter, to a debut that’s in turns lyrical and brutal. . . . It all adds up to a powerful meditation on the cycle of life. . . . This one will stick with readers long after the last page is turned.”—Publishers Weekly

Life attenuated

That's the theme. It's pretty remarkable actually how many ways Gaydos finds to explore it in this otherwise short book (her first love is poetry). At first I couldn't figure out why I felt depressed - early death, failure to thrive, disease and rot and blood sucking pets - oh man what is this dark vision of Vermont farming! Verging on visceral horror. Once I realized she had a theme and was actually doing something, I started getting into it, saw the light, had an epiphany. I hate to spoil it here but this is a gem. A lot more going on then a typical book of "I became a farmer" memoir, though it does give a flavor of what those old 1970s hippy farming communes in Vermont have become, and a side of working class rural farming life in New England. The ending brings it all home, the biggest one of all. Wait for it. Good. Unique stuff.

Muck

What muck. Sorry I followed New York Times suggestion. And this 15 words requirement is stupid.