Synopses & Reviews
From a bracing new voice comes this life-affirming memoir of a daughter making and remaking her life in her mother’s image.
Sifting gingerly through memories of her late mother, brilliant newcomer Sarah McColl has penned an indelible tribute to the joy and pain of loving well. Even as her own marriage splinters, McColl drops everything when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, returning to the family farmhouse and laboring over elaborate meals in the hopes of nourishing her back to health. In a series of vibrant vignettes — lipstick applied, novels read, imperfect cakes baked — McColl reveals a woman of endless charm and infinite love for her unruly brood of children.
Mining the dual losses of both her young marriage and her beloved mother, McColl confronts her identity as a woman, walking lightly in the footsteps of the woman who came before her and clinging fast to the joy she left behind. With candor reminiscent of classics like C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, Joy Enough offers a story that blooms with life.
Review
“Sarah McColl’s Joy Enough resonates with the immediacy of a love letter and the dark wonder of a dream. A tender, candid, force field of an elegy, compressed and expansive at once.” Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship
Review
“Written with enough beauty to stop clocks ticking and heart's beating.... McColl's resonant first book is resplendent with love, and the hope she finds in discovering that her unfathomable grief also carved a space for more profound joy.” Annie Bostrom, Booklist (starred review)
Review
“Beautifully tender; a deceptively delicate slow-burn story of grief and love and the desire to hold close those we love.” Sophie Mackintosh. Booker Longlisted author of The Water Cure
Review
“Joy Enough is a diamond in book form, a beauty forged by the weight of loss and learning. It stunned me with its taut clarity, with the way it probes — quietly, gently, unflinchingly — the parts of life that a lot of us don't like to look at: death, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of the body. This may be Sarah McColl's debut, but it's a towering achievement by any standard. McColl has a rare talent, and it shines.” Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life and Delancey
About the Author
Sarah McColl was founding editor-in-chief of Yahoo Food and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere, and she has been a MacDowell Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Los Angeles.