You Should Read SANDWICH by Catherine Newman
Reading Notes
Last night I recreated the soundtrack of my childhood: I took my mom to see Hootie and the Blowfish. Growing up, I spent approximately seven thousand hours in the backseat each summer, driving to Minnesota and Arkansas, and Hootie’s Cracked Rear View cassette played for at least a quarter of those hours. At the concert we mumble-sang along with Darius and danced like glorious fools, and now I cannot get the opening lyrics of “Time” out of my head: “Time why you punish me / Like a wave bashing into the shore / You wash away my dreams.”
“I only wanna be with youuuuuuuuu”
“But turn off the main drag in either direction and find yourself quickly at the sea: sandy cliffs and windswept grasses; tumbling pink roses and vast blue skies and a tideline hemmed with stones and mussels and bright green ruffles of seaweed.”
A confession: As a lifelong landlocked Coloradan, I’ve never been a big beach fan. What I do like, though, is a good lake.
In Minnesota and Arkansas we visited family, sure, but mostly, we laked, a verb which encompasses everything from floating on a pool noodle to skimming the surface on water skis to eating nothing but soggy chips and soda for days. Newman’s novel of a family’s annual visit to their Cape Cod beach rental reminded me of those lost summers, summers which Rocky, the narrator, might describe as “crushingly beautiful.”
The only lake time I got this summer was in my friend’s Colorado neighborhood. No waterskiing, but the view more than makes up for it.
The novel’s title refers to Rocky’s place in the middle of her adult children and her aging parents. It also becomes a symbol in the book as Rocky, “complain[ing] joyfully about how particular everyone is,” packs lunches for her family and tries to recreate their favorite traditions. Now that her children, Willa and Jamie, are grown, Rocky tries to remain present in each moment. Despite her best intentions—and provoked by hot flashes—she becomes nostalgic for her children’s childhoods. More specifically, she reminisces about the brief-and-endless time she spent as a mother to young, clingy, sandy children.
Nostalgia has a reputation for washing out the past’s hurt and disappointment and leaving behind only happy memories, the way a miner pans for gold. But Rocky doesn’t give in to that oblivious brand of remembrance. She reflects:
“In the Cape photos from when the children were little, I’m squinting grimly into the sun to make sure they’re not drowning or choking on sand or catching spontaneously on fire. A deep, worried line divides my forehead in half. I remember not only the vigilance but also—more shamefully—the exasperation. ”
In the familiar beach setting, Rocky can’t help but see herself clearly. Secrets revealed by generations on both sides place her own lies in relief, and over the course of one week, Rocky comes to terms with choices and losses from her past.
My signed copy of Sandwich, courtesy of the Parnassus First Editions Club (thanks, Hannah!)
Rocky’s concerns about parenthood and aging are neither new nor unusual. What makes her story worth reading is the humor Newman suffuses in her characters, characters who consistently made me think: Me, too! Rocky learns to gather all her competing emotions—love for her children, fear for her parents, shame for her actions, resentment for her husband, sadness at lost time—into a single, chaotic embrace. Even when she makes choices I wouldn’t, she still behaves in ways I understand, and in her insecurities, I also understand myself.
Whether you’re a beach person or a lake person (or neither!), I hope you’ll feel the same way.
At the end of the week, before packing up to leave, Willa suggests the family swim in the pond. “Before we run out of time,” she pleads.
Ah, time. Last night, arm around my mom, I belted “Time” out of key: “And now only lasts for one second, one second.” Hootie knows. So does Catherine Newman. As Rocky reminds us at the end of her journey, “[Y]ou might as well love as much as you can. And recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.”
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2024
Length: 226 pages; audiobook runs close to 6 hours
Setting: Cape Cod
Timeline: one week at the beach
Narrator: single first-person narrator, Rocky
Content Warning: pregnancy loss
Book Club
Secrets and confessions abound across all three generations in this book. Rocky keeps her secret from her husband out of guilt and shame. Rocky’s mother keeps her secret from Rocky because she doesn’t want her daughter to worry. Maya keeps her secret from Jamie because she wants to make up her own mind. Under what circumstances might it be acceptable or appropriate to keep a secret? How does revealing a secret change both the teller and the listener?
Willa gets angry with her brother for skipping their candy store tradition and “simply purchas[ing] a half pound of rocky-road fudge rather than spending an hour like there’s an exam coming up and one question will be a compare and contrast about flying-saucer Satellite Wafers versus Zotz.” What’s a childhood tradition you cherish? What makes it so special? How have you tried to recreate it?
Close Reading
Although the title, Sandwich, refers to Rocky’s placement between her adult children and aging parents, this passage hints at how the dynamic continues with each generation:
“When we get to the beach, Willa runs to the water with her pail. I’m so in love with her that if we were marsupials, I’d be stuffing her grown self back into my pouch. You’re fine! I’d say to my leggy, complaining kangaroo or my cranky eucalyptus-scented koala. Get in there and be quiet. Instead I take her picture with my phone. She wades through the shallows, bending down to scoop up the hermit crabs that are scuttling away, darting along the bottom from seaweed clump to seaweed clump like spies in a spy movie. ‘Hello, little friend!’ she says to every crab she meets. She holds them close to her face, talks to them gently” (61).
I like this scene because it perfectly encapsulates Rocky’s contradictory emotions toward her kids. While she’s delighted to have them as grown-up companions, she also misses who they were as children. She has the urge to keep Willa safe in a “pouch” and imagines whispering consoling words to her daughter.
In the same way, Willa picks up a crab and greets each one “gently.” Although in a later scene Willa says she’s not sure if she’ll ever have kids, she demonstrates a caring, maternal instinct for animals. She also extends this attitude to Rocky, telling her, “Mom, try not to hurt your own feelings for no reason” (56). Even if Willa chooses not to have kids, she will also be sandwiched between her parents and her own creative passions. Without knowing it, Willa is showing Rocky how to care for those on both sides of the timeline, too.
Creative Writing
Fiction: Each time Rocky tries to explore a tender, hidden secret from her past, Newman deploys a repetitive bit of syntax to ease the reader into the transition:
“The summer Jamie was four and Willa was not yet one…” (84)
“Jamie was four then, and Willa was not yet one…” (109)
“The summer Jamie was five and Willa was not yet two…” (122)
“The summer Jamie was five and Willa was not yet two…” (138)
Use this syntactical template to explore the relationship between two characters. Choose two points from which to anchor your timeline. These could be ages of people, as in Sandwich, or other events, landmarks, or seasons. Anything. Try using one of the following sentence starters:
The summer I wanted ___ and he wanted ____, we ____.
The summer I lived in ____ and she lived in ____, we ____.
The [season] I was ____ and they were ____, we _____.
Change any pronouns, seasons, verbs, or details that you need to!
Sentence Study
Allow me to put my teacher hat on for a moment and direct you to The Great Gatsby (which, if you haven’t read since high school, you should read again). Not until chapter six does Fitzgerald reveal a key event from Gatsby’s past:
“And it was from Cody that he inherited money—a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn’t get it. He never understood the legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man.”
We don’t ever know much more about Dan Cody, Gatsby’s mentor—but we actually don’t need to because Fitzgerald so masterfully packs an entire history into just a few sentences.
Newman pulls off the same trick in Sandwich:
“Willa, for example, has a story that’s not mine to share. I’ll just tell you that one spring morning three years ago I posted a photograph from a hospital window of a Boston park in bloom and a friend on social media—a person I had never even met in real life—wrote me privately to say, ‘Hey, I know that view. I’m here, head of pediatrics. Let me know if you need anything or if I can help in any way.’”
This brief passage deepens the relationship between Willa and Rocky because it hints at a near-tragic experience they share. Although Willa appears cool and assured, Rocky’s not-story allows readers to infer that Willa’s confidence has been hard-won. Suddenly, the image of adult Willa racing to sea, pail in hand, becomes more poignant. No wonder Rocky fantasizes about being a marsupial and “stuffing [Willa’s] grown self back into [her] pouch.” Rocky has come close to losing her daughter at least once before. The fact that she doesn’t reveal the details underscores her love and respect for Willa as an individual. On a story level, Newman’s choice to gloss over this history moves the plot forward without bogging us down in back story.
