handiwork by Sara Baume. No Advance Reader Copy included. No affiliate links used. Read my full disclosure policy here.
“This house is a house of industry.
It has four bedrooms, only one of which is devoted to sleep.” writes Sara Baume early in handiwork—her non-fiction debut—setting the tone for the exploration of creative process, grief and the migration of birds that follows.
Building the model birds—photographs of which are interspersed throughout the book—is the physical part of a process that, for Baume, includes learning about the migration pattern of the birds she is making. A learning that encompasses bird-lore and the lives of the men who studied birds, particularly John James Audubon and his book Birds of America which he illustrated.
Baume’s grief is woven throughout handiwork, in the way that grief shows up everywhere following the death of a loved one.
Speaking about her dad’s wake, Baume recalls a colleague of her mother’s—a man she barely knew—somewhat overenthusiastically informing her that “It hasn’t really hit you yet” and “It’s going to really hit you later.” A conversation familiar to many of us who have found ourselves in similar positions.
The tellers of these truths mean it a kind way. They want to prepare us for what comes next. For what happens when the funeral is over and, later still, when people no longer ask how we are doing. The thing about grief is: it is different for everyone and it is not always possible to judge whether someone’s bereavement has “really hit” them or not.
handiwork is a tender and thought-provoking look at what it means to be an artist, in all its forms, written with all of the originality we have come to expect from Baume’s fiction.
handiwork by Sara Baume is published by Tramp Press and is available in paperback and ebook format.