In a world increasingly lived online, there is a grounding comfort to Jo Ann Beard’s refreshingly analog voice. This isn’t to say her writing isn’t relevant or that her language doesn’t wow. Beard’s power comes from phrasings and insights that aren’t just screaming for likes. Few writers are so wise and self-effacing and emotionally honest all in one breath ... Over the course of nine beguiling pieces — which seamlessly meld observation and imagination — she effects an intimacy that makes us want to sit on the rug and listen ... If obsession is a writer’s fuel, Beard is powered by the 'beautiful and stupid' acts of hanging on and letting go. Every line builds thematic texture, instructing us on how to read, and what to take from it all. Seemingly unrelated phrases advance Beard’s ethos. Festival Days is 'brutal and routine,' a meditation on the 'dirt-colored scraps of hide and humanity' ... Beard flawlessly captures the fluidity of time. A minute becomes an eternity. Linearity collapses like a fallen souffle ... Beard imagines her way into anything...If her essays read like stories that’s because she is less concerned with cold accounts, and drawn more to detail and interiority and the choices people do and don’t make ... Invention allows her to excavate a deeper truth ... Beard navigates the darkness with her signature wit.
Beard is so good at what she does ... In Beard's book, writing works like compound interest, each experience building on the last, which built on the one before, till 'nothing new'— all the dying dogs and aging friends, abandoned houses and abandoned women (and cancer, which pervades this collection)—is something new, something more, and 'very moment of your life brings you to the moment you're experiencing now. And now. And now.'
... ferocious ... what, exactly, are we seeing? This question nipped at my heels throughout this book, even as the writing propelled me forward ... When a piece of writing is autobiographical, or semi-autobiographical, or memoir-adjacent, as many of these essays appear to be (not only those written in the first person, but also a couple that feature a character called Joan), the questions it provokes are: Why insert this distance here and not there? What does the similar but not identical name allow her to say — and us to receive — that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise? These questions act not as obstructions but revelations. They invite us to peel away some of our certainties, defenses, blinders ... But when this casualness — is it casualness? We might as easily call it daring, or radical empathy, or resistance to over-scrupulosity — is applied to another person’s story, it provokes a different set of questions. Why weren’t the reportable facts enough? What has been gained — aesthetically, morally, spiritually — and what has been lost by mingling the real and the invented? ... This is not censure masquerading as inquiry. It’s a testament to Beard, a towering talent, that she pulls off what might otherwise seem an act of egoistic insouciance to deliver a book as forceful as it is fine, leaving us both awed and unsettled ... What’s unsettling isn’t just her flouting of the distinction between fact and fiction. It’s her themes — often loss, violence, destruction, death — as well as her forms. Even before we understand what’s happening, we may find ourselves bracing for a blow ... A premonitory energy, an inchoate awareness, powers us along like a perfectly modulated engine, barely audible but filling every line with tension, the tension of knowing we’re heading inexorably toward the unknown. Sometimes she’ll break things up with humor (there’s a killer bit, the funnier for being hypothetical, about a poet and a prose writer catching ducks). Sometimes she’ll shake things up by having the encounter to which the essay is building turn out to be sweet. Sometimes she seems to practice a kind of augury that involves throwing wildly disparate items into the air, then trying to make sense of them once they land. Occasionally she slides into such elliptical allusiveness ... it’s as if she couldn’t care less whether we’re following along or not. But in every one of these pieces, her method does its work. Perhaps instead of an essayist we should think of her as a poet-naturalist, wedding intuition and observation, and forming from this union something unaccountably yet undeniably real.
Beard’s prose is never more intensely vibrant than when describing death ... shimmers with a similar emotional intensity, especially when evoking the flashes of memory that come to those pausing on the threshold between life and death ... Beard is known as a nonfiction essayist, but her work often reads like suspenseful fiction ... Allowing her work to exist beyond the labels of fiction or nonfiction, Beard’s metaphorical patterns evince the imaginative truths that underlie her writing ... These resonances across the essays suggest a greater unity, a story unfolding over a lifetime ... Beard’s literary powers are most evident in the long eponymous essay that concludes this collection. Here, Beard weaves metaphor and memory into a stunning portrait of lifelong friendship, of those relationships that hold us and ground us across the decades, that persist with love even to the final goodbye.
... consistently hair-raising ... bracing ... You can make shit up, but you can still be telling the truth ... The most indelible stories in Festival Days observe just as unflinchingly as Beard’s characters face the extremities of life and death. I can’t think of a writer who puts words to our most difficult moments as adroitly as Beard—who so steadfastly refuses to cut away when things get tough. It never makes Festival Days an ordeal to read, though I found myself needing to take a walk when I reached the final page of each piece. During those walks, I found myself revisiting the stories, feeling invigorated to be in the company of someone who seems so much braver than me, and to soak up just some of that bravery ... Beard’s big-heartedness and plain-spokenness makes death less scary than it seems most of the rest of the time. I think it’s because of a writerly trick that Beard uses in each of these stories, which has the effect of making the deaths proper culminations of the pieces in which they appear ... Beard is fond, as a writer, of finding three or four recurring images in a story and returning to them again and again, worrying over them like prayer beads...It doesn’t feel repetitive; it feels like the work of a writer, taking things that might otherwise become familiar and finding new meaning in them each time they return ... When, in her characters’ final moments, she returns one last time to those images, the effect is comforting. Even when these deaths are frightening, sad, or violent, they have meaning: the order imposed by a writer who patiently, kindly, takes us by the hand and explains how things are.
... despite these differences in form, each piece feels like it belongs to a category of writing that is uniquely Beard’s own ... it is ironic that in sum, 'Festival Days' communicates this joy less so than other pieces in the collection...The essay captures Beard’s own grief, but what’s missing from the essay is a precise picture of the friend she’s losing: we never learn what type of writing Kathy does, for instance, or what drew her to India in the first place. Moreover, Beard’s gaze, carefully calibrated to the natural beauty and social tensions of American college towns, wavers when it comes to rendering India. The descriptions too closely resemble comments that uncomfortable Americans write on travel websites: the animals on the street are starving, the men are intimidating, the women are beautiful. I wondered, when reading the essay, if the two problems were related: if Beard was unable to explain what their last trip meant to Kathy because she failed to see India through her friend’s eyes ... The misstep of Festival Days is only worth mentioning because it is the one previously unpublished piece in the collection. Otherwise, the collection as a whole is remarkable. In other collections, I often find that in bringing different forms together, an author sacrifices the cohesion of their book. In Festival Days on the other hand, the disparateness of the pieces highlights the consistency of Beard’s style. Beard renders the boring and the everyday in the same vivid language as the violent and the truly awful. In the end, Beard’s writing bounds over literary questions of fiction versus nonfiction. Her essays instead resemble forms plucked from life itself: eulogies, stories told around a fire, narratives of our own lives that echo in our heads.
... a set of diverse pieces that sometimes challenge the boundary between fiction and nonfiction but that are consistent in the intensity of their perception and their vivid prose ... On whichever side of the fact/fiction line she acknowledges for her is sometimes 'permeable,' Jo Ann Beard's stories fall, they undeniably resonate with the feeling of truth.
Beard writes about pain, cancer, death, divorce, violence, and bizarre alignments, subjects one may prefer to avoid, but Beard’s cascades of breathtaking detail are irresistible as she evokes the tangible world, the inner realm, and life’s welter of the unexpected and the inevitable ... The title essay recounts indelible, beautiful, absurd, and sorrowful experiences from Beard’s life, including a trip to India and a detonated marriage. There is extraordinary energy and force in Beard’s refined, penetrating, darkly rhapsodic prose as she writes of family, dogs, love, friendship, chaos, and danger in zigzagging associations, spiraling juxtapositions, and sudden switchbacks, seeking to 'make art out of life' and succeeding brilliantly and profoundly.
Through nine pieces --- wildly different in genre, length, topic and tone --- she unravels the mysteries of experiencing time through moments of change and crisis. After a year defined by such moments, these essays are a compassionate companion ... Beard squeaks open a door to a rich world of people and experiences where time is elastic and everyone seems to know it ... She articulates the common sensations of time passing and beautifully narrates the connection between the suspended moments and everything that leads up to them ... includes fiction pieces that seamlessly flow from the nonfiction and memoir that dominate the majority of the pages ... Although the book in no way directly addresses the strange mental tax of a year of a pandemic, it feels like the perfect companion for our collective crisis.
This imaginative and precise collection shows Beard at her best ... Beard can evoke many emotions in a single stroke ... She’s also cunning with surprising metaphors and details ... These sharp essays cement Beard’s reputation as a master of the form.
... gripping and meditative ... vary in style, substance, and quality ... A rangy collection, sometimes insightful, uneven, and occasionally unsettling.
