The best books about new beginnings
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert has long been the hoary cliche of new starts, the story of a woman who apparently can’t find any decent Italian food in New York, but for my money it is not a patch on the best of that genre, Julia Child’s My Life in France, the memoir of how she wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is great on food, but even better on life, and accepting it just as it is. She finds joy everywhere, and it’s extremely hard not to fall in love with her.
If the weather is not behaving itself and you want to heat up a little, How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan is the sexy, sun-drenched story of a woman finding herself in the Caribbean with a handsome younger man, full of laughs and heart. You will also unfailingly be cheered by Elizabeth von Arnim’s absolutely gorgeous 1922 novel The Enchanted April, about a mismatched set of women spending a month together in Tuscany; it’s pure escapist heaven.
The best series about changing yourself and finding where you belong remains of course Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Mouse and Michael and the rest’s lives take many twists and turns but their courage to follow their own paths, whatever the cost, remains bittersweet, uplifting, and a stunning story of its time.
Triumphing over your background like spring triumphs over winter is always fertile territory for memoir. Perhaps the most exciting recently is Tara Westover’s Educated; she had a home life that is frankly astonishing, and how she ends up doing a master’s at Cambridge will make your heart soar. If you are in the mood for a rather gentler story of a woman getting her education, Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster is as tender and funny as ever.
An avalanche of similar novels followed the phenomenon of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (it has sold 1.8m copies); the best of them is probably Needlemouse by Jane O’Connor, about an utter horror of a secretary who slowly and painfully gets nicer.
For more general cheer, turn off the news and leaf through Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature, both books about how despite it all, things are genuinely getting better for almost everyone, with lots of serious-looking graphs to prove it. They may not be panaceas, but they are useful correctives to the doom narratives de nos jours.
And finally, although he is wildly out of fashion, I have a soft spot for the poetry of AE Housman and all those young dead boys he so desperately wanted to love, as in “Spring Morning”:
Star and coronal and bell
April underfoot renews,
And the hope of man as well
Flowers among the morning dews.
• The Bookshop on the Shore by Jenny Colgan is published by Sphere (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
