Our November Pick for Soup of the Month is Sunshine State: Essays by Sarah Gerard!

Reading this book is like being blindfolded and led by the hand—round and round, over a hill, along a long, straight bit—then spun in a circle or two. You have no clue where you’re going. You’re unsure why you’re going there. But from page one, you trust no one more than Sarah Gerard to be the person holding your hand and guiding you. (And if you’re anything like me, you will be shaken and literally struck with awe when she brilliantly removes the blindfold at the end and shows you the entire path on which you traveled.)
 

This is a book of essays, but it parts from the immediacy of the essay form. Rather than gathering pieces that are temporally close to each other (as most essayists seem to do), Gerard is comfortable letting her collection span the length of her entire life so far. Her essays are about widely-varying topics that seem often deeply unrelated; she writes about the tangled history of the Unity Church and growing up in it, about homelessness in St. Petersburg, about a bird sanctuary in the Florida Keys as it falls apart in slow motion.

While Gerard herself is heavily present in some essays and nothing but a background figure in most, we get to see her voice grow and mature as she ages over the course of the collection— and this is absolutely where she is most brilliant. Late in the book, we see an adult Gerard cope with the reality of a loved one’s illness and death with an understanding that the teenage version of her (who we’ve witnessed taking ecstasy, hooking up, and trying to figure out what it means to love someone at all) could not have fathomed.

I’m obsessed with this book because Gerard doesn’t over-concern herself with the perpetual essayist’s struggle of the political versus the personal. She is wholly both, every step of the way, merely by shifting in subtle ways the tone of her voice. Because of this, we get to grow with her, and come to her understandings with her, and question things with her. A keen reporter and memoirist, Gerard invites us to be these things right along with her. When she asks a question, you really get the sense that she doesn’t yet know the answer—as if she wrote this book in real time while she had every experience and underwent every interview in it.

The most perfect blends of boldness and subtly that I’ve ever read, the essays of Sunshine State are like well-worn favorite songs to me—whenever I think of one, I immediately remember exactly where I was and what I felt when I first read it. I’ll continue to re-read this book again and again until the record skips, and I’ll continue to cherish the nostalgia Gerard has given me for experiences I never actually had. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed if you do the same.

- Afton Montgomery, Book Soup Bookseller

 Order your copy HERE!