Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I guess it was Toni Morrison who said “write the book you want to read,” if that book doesn’t seem to exist yet. “Festival Days” is the book I wanted to read (though didn’t know it) as well as write, but as luck would have it, I didn’t need to because Jo Ann Beard already wrote it.

A tremendous group of essays (maybe some are stories, fiction) which reminded me how much I love reading books of well-written essays. Joan Didion’s work from the 60s-70s like “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album” are also books of essays and are what made me want to write in the first place.
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I haven’t written essays yet. Maybe I will. (So far just fiction, and one memoir.) But for the reader, these are what I’d call real page-turners, from the one that drew me to the book (an account of escaping a fire, the insanely unbelievable, yet true “Werner”) to the title story, “Festival Days,” which effortlessly weaves a trip to India with the death of relationships and a close friend, and so much more. “Maybe it Happened” is a terrifying account of a home invasion attack on a single person home alone – which does seem so real and raw it can’t be fiction. But I don’t know.

In the last year, I have remembered a lot of my dreams, which for me is a bit unusual. Maybe it’s the pandemic, but they’re infused with anxiety/longing about things past, present and most of all, future. I find that Beard’s stories often have this random dreamlike quality to them, and her gift is making a universe that’s so rich with the connections. Or maybe it’s because we’re both Boomers, the same age (if a detail in one of the stories, she being 8 when Kennedy was assassinated, as I was, is true) and there is more past now than future – and the awareness of that colors it all.

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