This was a difficult book for me to read, categorize, and evaluate.  Is it a memoir, a book about farming, an intense, inside look at life for those living on the margin, a book about writing, or is it all about pigs???

Gaydos, a graduate of Columbia’s MFA in writing program, returns to her Vermont roots and leaves the somewhat more comfortable challenge of becoming a writer for the uncomfortable challenges of being a farmworker. She does manual labor from dawn to dusk at farms in Barre, VT and New Lebanon, NY, driving tractors, planting seeds, harvesting tons of vegetables, driving miles and staffing farm stands in Union Square and a half-abandoned mall in Troy, NY, and filling her off work hours with beer at the local bar.  Struggling with her desire to have children and searching for the meaning in her life, she settles on raising pigs, a satisfying combination of supporting nature while bending it to the benefit of man.

The writing is uneven.  There are some beautifully lyrical passages in which she strikes the perfect note in a metaphor or set of adjectives, but these passages alternate with overdone similes and descriptions that border on the trite.  On balance, she’s a terrific writer, but seemed to be stretching for material to reach book length.  The details of the slaughter of the pigs and the processes by which these former animals are converted to sausage, hams, bacon, head cheese, etc. were too much for me. Most unsettling, however, was peering into the details of the lives of these New England farmers and manual workers trying to wrest a living from the soil or from animals in their care.  Tough, tough, tough!

If you’ve ever wanted to be a hands-on farm worker or if you want the details of how the other 99% live in rural New England, this is the book for you.  On the other hand, you may not want to know more than you currently do about how bacon and zucchinis get to your dinner table.