REVIEW: Revelation at the Foodbank by Merrill Joan Gerber

Reviewed by Vicki Mayk

The email I received with the advance review copy (ARC) for Merrill Joan Gerber’s essay collection Revelation at the Food Bank (Sagging Meniscus; December 2023) included a publicist’s note that said the author is 85 years old. “This very well may be her final book,” the publicist said. Intrigued – I’d never heard of this writer – I Googled Ms. Gerber’s name.

Well.

She has written 25 books, including fiction (novels and short stories), nonfiction (memoirs and essays) and YA titles. An O Henry Award. A Pushcart Prize. Inclusion in Best American Essays. Other honors. Decades teaching at Caltech. Her biography is a testimony to what book lovers often say: So many books, so little time. So many good writers we may never read. I turned my attention to the ARC and I’m so glad I did. It would be a loss to have missed Merrill Joan Gerber’s writing. It is a pleasure to read – and, as a writer, I took many lessons about the craft of writing from her work.

Consider the first line from the collection’s title essay: “Did you ever have sex with another woman?” I asked my husband when he was eighty-five and we had been married for sixty-two years. Who could stop reading? I had no choice but to continue with this piece that won a place in 2023’s Best American Essays. The question is the entry point to an essay that combines Gerber’s pandemic experiences visiting a local church’s foodbank with the questions and challenges arising from her decades-long marriage to her husband and health issues related to their advancing age.

She skillfully braids these narrative threads and when we are done reading, it seems the most logical thing in the world to have combined these topics. After all, during the pandemic, we all begin to question so many things, so It makes sense that she would ask her husband that opening question. When she writes about health issues and medical tests that accompany old age, she also is pondering the questions about mortality that arose for all of us during the pandemic. And lest you think this essay considers only serious issues, please note there are moments of humor, such as this one, when Gerber’s husband chooses to go play the piano when she asked for his help with the laundry:

There are limits, even in a marriage of over sixty-two years, that can be breached. How many times do Bach’s French Suites need to be played, no matter how beautifully and artistically and precisely when a family’s underwear needs to be washed, dried ,and folded?

Moving through the other essays in the collection, readers are rewarded with many other fine pieces.

Three pieces pieces employ the epistolary form with skill. The first – “True Believer: My Friendship with Cynthia Ozick” – reflects on Gerber’s long relationship, with fellow writer Ozick. It is both an examination of Jewish identity and the chronicle of a complicated friendship that ends with a disagreement about politics that will resonate with all of us in this election year. The second, “Letters Home From College: The Making of a Writer,” offers a glimpse into Gerber’s college years at the University of Florida.. Although not my favorite, I enjoyed reading about Gerber’s early years pursuing the craft.

The third essay using letters in the narrative, titled “A Life in Letters: A Decades-Long Correspondence with the Italian Writer Arturo Vivante,” was fascinating  because it introduced me to another writer with solid credentials who, like Gerber, was unknown to me.

Gerber is at her best, however, when not employing letters to do the storytelling. Her own fine writing makes each essay a jewel, packed with delicious turns of phrase, such as this one, in which she writes about the fact that she and her husband now play Scrabble on their computers:

We no longer played Scrabble together, with wooden tiles at the kitchen table as we used to do. Now we each played separately, on our own computers. It was faster that way, and private. Like pornography. No pausing for the needs of the other.

Although it’s tempting to write at length about every essay, I will comment on just two others that were favorites. “My Suicides” is an unsparing recounting of Gerber’s experiences with five suicides and attempted suicides of friends, relatives, and acquaintances, ending with recollections of her time working at a suicide hotline. The contrasts among these suicides are powerful. In one case, she writes of her brother-in-law’s attempts to make her “an accomplice to his suicide” when he was separated from her sister. After he makes yet another threatening call to Gerber, saying he will kill himself if she doesn’t convince her sister to call him, they are unable to reach him. Before he is found dead by police, Gerber uses a stunning image to foreshadow his passing:

In the wash I saw a family of peacocks. A peahen, dun-colored, drab, and her two chicks were walking slowly in the shallow rivulets of water and matted leaves. They seemed lost and confused. They walked first to one side of the wash, then the other. It was hard to imagine how they had got in there, or how they would get out. My eyes were searching in vain for the peacock, the male with his bright colored fan of feathers, his shimmering energy, his beauty. But he was not there.

Gerber is a writer’s writer, sharing memories of more than 60 years of working at the craft. I will confess my favorite essay in the collection is “Why I Must Give Up Writing.” I have shared it with several writer friends. In just a few pages, using real examples from her long career, she conveys the frustrations writers all know: myriad rejections, the demoralizing book submission process, the challenges of working with agents and editors. She closes the essay with these words:

But when a writer has given away great chunks of her life, and all her understanding of it, and all her knowledge of it, when she has risked losing friendships and the love of family members, when she has typed ten million words (but never had a job as a typist, never had a real income, never will have a pension), when her books are published but often not reviewed and even less read, and when she finds that bitterness is overtaking hopefulness, isn’t it time to stop?

Fortunately for us, instead she has given us this book.

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