Tending Our Wounds: On Catherine Newman's Novel, Sandwich

“We’ll be tending our wounds. And we’ll be as young and as whole as we’re ever going to be.” - Catherine Newman, Sandwich

I just finished Catherine Newman’s new novel Sandwich, and I’m feeling a lot of feelings. I expected Sandwich to be great because I love everything Catherine Newman writes, but it was a balm for a wound I did not realize I was nursing.

That’s what I love about books. Our feelings about them are highly personal and subjective. Some of my favorite books possess little literary merit but have found a place on my list of essential re-reads based on their emotional, temporal, or geographical entanglements.

Sandwich is a town on Cape Cod, where the bicep would be if the Cape were to let up on tricep day. A big part of my childhood was spent in a lovely house on Corn Hill in Truro, the second to last town on the very tip of the arm, where the Cape would wear her watch if she cared about the time.

When I was very small, my parents rented with friends, but when their best friend, Richard, bought our favorite of the hilltop houses, it became our second home, the place where my most visceral, cherished, rose-tinged memories were formed. The pine floors were soft under my feet, the sound of the bayside waves constant and gentle, and the light of the morning sun in the front bedroom remains my favorite filter.

When the house burned in the eighties, we all wept as if a family member had died. My father oversaw its reconstruction down to the perfect placement of the toilet. In a house bursting with actors, musicians and other sorts of wonderfully loud and dramatic guests, it was the only place one could be alone to lean on the windowsill looking out at Provincetown, down at the rock that emerged at low tide, and the cute boy from the cottage two doors over.

Richard died in 1992 and he took the magic of that house with him. We tried, we really did. We agreed to think of it as a new place, a future place, but our last gasp visit ended in an explosive family fight that served as final punctuation on that chapter of our lives.

Cape Cod has changed since the seventies and eighties for everyone, of course. It’s fancier, more curated. Less wild and dangerous, more pruned and planned. Everyone knows where the hidden freshwater pond is, and they are all there, all the time.

I mourn the loss of what Cape Cod was to me, but Catherine Newman brought it back for me while I was immersed in her words, and for that, I am grateful. Her novel bears little resemblance to my lived experiences, and yet it evoked moments and images that resonated deep in my body.

That’s what great books do for us. They help us feel things we thought we’d lost. They describe the things we lived and how they felt.

Read Sandwich. It will likely be something completely different for you than it was for me, but it will be something beautiful, nevertheless.