You Should Read HESTIA STRIKES A MATCH by Christine Grillo
Reading Notes
If you’d told me a week ago that the novel to get me through my post-election disappointment would be a rom-com set in a current-day, dystopian America in the midst of a civil war, I wouldn’t have believed you. (There are a lot of things I wouldn’t have believed last week.)
But I’m telling you, Hestia Strikes a Match was the book for me.
I was sold on the second page:
“The war had begun in earnest in February. Or rather, that’s when it began officially. The warfare had been quite earnest for years, but we were in the habit of giving it names like ‘arson’ or ‘shootings’.”
These sentences read like a wrist-slap. When Hestia offered a correction—that subtle but powerful “Or rather”—on the war’s origins, I felt as if Grillo was sitting on my shoulder, asking if I’ve been paying attention. Yes, I thought. The words we use to describe trauma and catastrophe matter.
Before you worry this book is a downer, let me point out that immediately preceding this killer (sorry!) line, Hestia lists acceptable typos and clichés for online dating profiles:
“I knew I wouldn’t be in danger of falling too hard, because he’d written, ‘I’m doing my up-most to live life to the fullest.’ ... In my thirties, ‘up-most’ would have been a hard pass, but at forty-two, it was a point in his favor.”
Therein lies the magic of Grillo’s book: She had me laughing in one paragraph and shaking my head in resigned recognition the next.
I couldn’t stop reading.
The book opens two months after the start of the war. Southern states have seceded and formed the New Confederated States of America. Hestia, a proud Unionist, lives in Maryland and works at a retirement village. Her husband has abandoned her to fight for the Union; her parents have abandoned her to live in the Confederacy. Amidst bombings, power outages, and poisoned water supplies, Hestia is lonely. “Pipe bombs can kill you quickly,” Hestia reflects, “but loneliness will kill you slowly. Life is a near-constant calculation of risks” (12). Lucky for her, even a civil war can’t stop online dating.
While she struggles to find a romantic connection, Hestia teaches a writing class at the village. Residents answer questions to record their histories for posterity. At first, this narrative construct seems like a clever form of world-building. Instead of dumping background information on us, Grillo includes a Q&A series from the writing group. For instance, when Hestia asks residents to describe what this war is about, one woman notes that it’s “the same civil war from more than one hundred fifty years ago. . . . It’s so simple that it’s boring. It’s always racism. And misogyny—of course. The perfect cocktail. A Black Madame president was a bridge too far” (14).
Indeed.
As Hestia begins to write alongside her students, she asks more personal questions, and her responses function as flashbacks. To answer a question about “early signs of incompatibility in [her] marriage,” Hestia describes witnessing a climate change protest where men in pickups ran their engines and spewed exhaust into the air around the protesters. Her infuriated husband pressed Hestia on her lukewarm response to the incident. She recalls, “I shrugged, because I was used to people like that, and I don’t think he ever accepted that some people are just unkind” (159).
Hestia’s husband may need to come to such a realization, but Hestia herself needs to realize that love is not synonymous with a sweeping love story. As she cycles through partners, breaking hearts and becoming broken-hearted, she questions both the possibility of intimacy and the impossibility of romance. Weighing whether or not to pursue one particular relationship, she thinks, “If I were with him, I’d have to give up on being romanced and find a way to love someone who was blunt and graceless, like me. I’d have to believe in myself and trust that he loved me” (314).
At the same time, she must navigate the tenuous relationship with her confederate parents. She’s not alone in her conflicted feelings. Her co-worker’s boyfriend becomes a confederate sympathizer. Her friend’s daughters take turns visiting her at the village but no longer speak to each other because they live in different countries. How are we, Hestia wonders, supposed to live in a country with such vast fissures?
Good question.
Today I took Nell for a run, and she buried her head in the snow.
At first I thought, Me too. But then she popped to the surface, tail wagging and ready to chase that next squirrel up a tree.
Okay, Nell. I get your point. Last week was my head-in-the-snow week. Now it’s time to resurface and face the question.
I don’t have an answer for you—other than to keep reading and writing and listening and explaining and showing compassion and citing your sources—and I won’t tell you the answer Hestia finds, but I will share some of her hard-earned wisdom: “When we’re young and new to [love], we know by instinct how to be with someone . . . But with every breakup or falling-out, we unlearn what we were born knowing. We doubt ourselves, mistrust our instincts, defend ourselves, prioritize the wrong things” (384).
Consider adding Hestia Strikes a Match to your list of priorities. I hope it is for you, like it was for me, the book you never knew you needed.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2023
Length: 386 pages; audiobook runs 12.5 hours
Timeline: about 2 years
Setting: Maryland, circa 2023
Narrator: 1st person narrator, Hestia
Pairs Well With: Sandwich by Catherine Newman; Somebody Somewhere on HBO (somebody, please, get Hestia one of Trisha’s embroidered pillows!)
Book Club
Hestia’s co-worker, Sarah, makes a vision board to manifest the boyfriend she desires. Although Hestia pokes fun at the board, she makes her own sort of vision board in her non-functional fireplace. She admits “to obsessing over . . . just the right arrangement for the fireplace” (49). She tries a collection of all-white candles, ceramic bowls, painted birdhouses, vases, and even discarded décor signs of the Live Laugh Love variety. None of these satisfy her. If you consider the fireplace a type of vision board, what type of future do you think Hestia might be manifesting with each iteration of her fireplace?
At a combative meal with her parents, Hestia’s father lays into her. He says, “What you’re forgetting, Hestia, is that humans are lousy. ... We like our tribes. That’s from birth! You can’t force new tribes on them. You can’t force people to be nice” (130). How would you respond to him?
Close Reading
One man Hestia dates sends her astrological sign to his mother for a reading. Although she claims that astrology is bogus, Hestia secretly becomes fascinated by the concept. She thinks:
“But what I found addictive were the stories that astrologers tell. Each asteroid, each planet, each orbiting rock has a name and a personality, in tandem with mythology (Greek, to be specific), and all these personalities intersect and interact and have force and consequence. . . . When you thought about how such tiny astral bodies—humans, I mean—affect each other minute to minute, just by coming closer to each other, or by pulling apart, maybe a shred of this made sense.”
Grillo sets up an extended metaphor comparing relationships to planetary positions. The very comparison rejects the clichéd idea of fate being written in the stars. Hestia and her love interests aren’t passive stars, destined to orbit a larger body; they are the larger bodies themselves. Additionally, one lesson Hestia needs to learn is the effect she has on others, “just by coming closer…or by pulling apart.” The astrological perspective encourages empathy and self-awareness.
Creative Writing
Fiction: When Hestia meets up with a high school boyfriend, she is surprised at how he has changed. She sums up the experience like this: “The human condition: Confusion.” Use that sentence as a template. Start a paragraph with this: “The human condition: ______.” The more specific the emotion or noun you can put in that blank, the better.
Continue your paragraph writing from the first-person perspective of someone who has just come to this realization about the human condition. How did they get there? What happened just prior to this moment to bring about this revelation? What will they do with this new insight?
Nonfiction: According to Hestia, living through a civil war teaches you to “expect disappointment,” which is why she values the way an interaction with Tom leaves her “pleasantly surprised.” Write about a time when you were pleasantly surprised. Who was responsible? What did they do to surprise you? How did you feel afterward?
Sentence Study
I’m returning to a sentence from the Close Reading because it’s so fantastic:
“Each asteroid, each planet, each orbiting rock has a name and a personality, in tandem with mythology (Greek, to be specific), and all these personalities intersect and interact and have force and consequence” (125).
This is a compound sentence. The first independent clause: “Each asteroid, each planet, each orbiting rock has a name and a personality, in tandem with mythology (Greek, to be specific).” The second independent clause is: “[A]ll these personalities intersect and interact and have force and consequence.”
The first clause includes a tricolon. Rhetorically speaking, that’s a list of three. There’s something uniquely satisfying about the number three. Think of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Think of the three-part sonata structure. Think of those dumb “Live Laugh Love” signs! Think of The Godfather trilogy (okay, I still have never watched them all the way through). In Grillo’s sentence, the device conveys the vastness of space.
The second clause uses polysyndeton, which is a strategy where the author separates items in a list with “and” instead of with commas. Each verb in this clause—“intersect” and “interact” and “have”—applies to its subject, “these personalities.” The polysyndeton creates a piling-on effect, but in this case, it emphasizes not the immensity of space but the infinite possibilities for celestial bodies to interact. To top it off, this clause is also another tricolon of sorts because it applies three verbs to a single subject!
