6/3/2023 0 Comments West with the night![]() ![]() ![]() Then I read the blurb on the back of the book by none other than Hemingway, taken from a letter to Maxwell Perkins: Beryl looks like the kind of self-important, gin-soaked, snake-tongued woman you’d avoid at a 1940s cocktail party-as though she might cut you with a bowie knife if you spilled chardonnay on her blouse. One afternoon I found Markham’s memoir hiding beneath stacks of sci-fi and literary fiction.Īt first I wasn’t drawn in by the sepia-toned photograph of the dour woman with high cheekbones and lipstick clad in an aviation cap. My husband and I recently bought the Vermont farmhouse he grew up in and began to move enormous boxes of his mother’s books. It was, I figured, a book for brave women. When she passed away after a bout with cancer, two weeks after the birth of my first child, I decided to read her favorite book, Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. She-my mother-in-law-was an Ivy League-educated, motorcycle-driving, garden-planting veterinarian in Vermont… with a pilot’s license. Her mother was a nurse, shot in World War II in Nepal. ![]()
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