Sandwich by Catherine Newman

One week in Cape Cod. The perfect family holiday. What could possibly go wrong…?

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their rustic beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, its quirky furniture and mismatched pots and pans greeted like old friends.

Now, sandwiched between her children who are adult enough to be fun but still young enough to need her, and her parents who are alive and healthy, Rocky wants to preserve this golden moment forever. This one precious week when everything is in balance; everything is in flux.

But every family has its secrets and hers is no exception.

With her body in open revolt and surprises invading her peaceful haven, the perfectly balanced seesaw of Rocky’s life is tipping towards change…

Rocky and her husband Nick have reached that middle point in life where adults seem to be at their most stretched. They’re coping with children who have left home or are living at university as well as increasingly elderly parents who need more help than they have before. This is the sandwich of the title. The emotions are conflicting, from the parental support a fledgling teenager still needs to the worry about their independence, as well as the feelings of loss that that come from empty nest syndrome. As for parents, it’s like a whole new stage in the relationship defined in the novel as ‘anticipatory grief’ because as they become increasingly frail there’s a constant reminder that the clock is ticking. This reminder of their mortality brings up feelings of loss and a sense of our own life being at their point where more is behind us than in front of us. I’m saying ‘we’ because I fall bang in the middle of this category. I have parents who have endless medical appointments, particularly Dad who seems to have surgery on a yearly basis like some sort of annuity. However, I also have one stepdaughter away at university, really stretching her wings as she ends her second year and moves in with her boyfriend. We’re only a quick call away though and we’ve gained a third child in the boyfriend. We miss her more than I can express. Then we have my other stepdaughter, one of the generation whose education has been massively affected by COVID. She has so many plans with friends that we now see her less so the loss is twofold. Then there’s the menopause, from sweating to vaginal atrophy it’s a veritable shitshow of symptoms that we’re just supposed to manage alongside everything else. To say I felt a kinship with our narrator Rocky, is an understatement. Again Catherine Newman has managed to put something on the page that’s raw, emotional and relatable. So much so that there were points in the book where I burst into tears.

Rocky is a great narrator in that I was immediately comfortable with her and believed in her world. This book was such an easy read and flowed so beautifully that I finished it in a day. A family trip to the Cape Cod holiday home they’ve rented since the children were small throws a family that’s scattered to the four winds, under one roof. Eldest child Tim is there with girlfriend Maya and student Willa has travelled from her college and meets them there. Later in the week grandma and grandad will join them for two days and of course there’s the ancient cat. They are rather piled in on tap of one another but they couldn’t come here to a different, bigger rental because so many of their memories have been made in this house. During the course of the week Rocky will learn and divulge some secrets, all of them filtered through her anxiety and what husband Nick calls a hint of narcissism. This family were so like my own that I deeply appreciated my upbringing, even though some of it wasn’t easy – we never had money, found a secret sibling then happily lost them again, mum and dad had their turbulent years. Yet I always felt loved and that’s what there’s a surfeit of in this family, everyone loves everyone else even when they disagree. Rocky is a passionate and emotionally intelligent mother, the sort of mum you might go to with a secret. She also happy to be schooled where she gets it wrong, especially where daughter Willa is concerned. She might use the wrong pronouns and need to check her privilege occasionally but largely she’s the sort of mum you want. She feels things almost too deeply and I understood that in her. She wants to breathe in her children when they’re little. She reminds me a little of something my mum and Mother, my great-grandmother, used to say when my brother and me were little: ‘ I could eat you on a butty without salt’.

I think Catherine Newman is brilliant when it comes to trauma and intergenerational family dynamics. There was a moment, as Rocky was reminiscing about a time when she miscarried that made me feel like she’d read my mind. I had recurrent miscarriages in my twenties and I’d never been desperate for children till I lost the first one. No one explained that grief can manifest in strange ways, in fact after my operation (which I’d had to consent to on a termination form) I was told when it would be physically possible to try again, but never that it might be a good idea to grieve first. To take time. As far as emotions went I was given a leaflet of phone numbers of women who’d had miscarriages – with the warning that in a lot of cases I might hear children in the background. I couldn’t bear to hear that so I didn’t call. What I do remember from that time was buying pregnancy tests in bulk and checking frequently whether I might be pregnant again, even if I’d already checked yesterday and knew I wasn’t. The author writes about Rocky staring at pregnancy tests, imagining she can see the second line in the window and trying again for the answer she really wants. I truly felt her pain in those moments and my own. I felt slightly less mad. To realise this was an understandable response to grief was so comforting. Every emotion I felt in those terrible couple of years was due to grief. I felt a failure, defective and terribly separate from people as if I was looking at life through a glass screen. Now thirty years later I’d like to thank Catherine for the way she handled this difficult story line because I finally felt less alone. I really admired the way she wrote about post-natal depression too. When my mum had my younger brother I was only four years old, but for years afterwards she had a morbid obsession that he was going to die. Every time something happened in his life she worried that this would be it. Now he would be taken away from her. I have to say that sometimes this felt very dismissive of me. Her explanation when I asked if she’d ever thought the same about me was that I could look after myself, despite me spending a long time in hospitals. This aspect of PND is something I’d never considered before and helped me to understand where she was coming from a little better.

I thought the author beautifully described how women are more aware of their bodies because we’re trained to be. In a medical world that’s often dismissive of things like period pain ( or anything that falls into the category of gynaecology and obstetrics) as a natural process, the author shows how these things truly feel physically and mentally. We have to ‘know’ as soon as we’ve got our period because the shame of being seen to bleed is fierce, especially as period shaming seems to be rife in secondary schools. Our minds and bodies are connected so we know if something is a normal pain or a pain that has a different feeling or intensity. As Rocky loses the idea of the baby she’s carrying, she’s also physically losing the baby. These moments are raw because the emotions are. There’s a desperation in physically losing a baby. The mind does gymnastics trying to find a way to keep them inside you where it’s safe. As Rocky reminisces about this time, the unresolved emotions are clear and perhaps stirred up by menopause symptoms and having her babies under one roof. I enjoyed Rocky and Nick’s marriage too. It’s not perfect and they haven’t really connected for a while, physically or mentally. When he stumbles on a long held secret it throws their dislocation into the spotlight and gives them the opportunity to talk. He still loves her, despite the fact she’s a bit of a narcissist. She recognises that throughout the holiday Nick has been cooking, organising, driving everyone and just quietly looking after everyone. They’ve been in their mum and dad roles for so long they’ve forgotten how to be Rocky and Nick. It’s something of a relief for Rocky to know that Nick still desires her, despite the expanding waistline and loss of libido. Also, as Nick points out, it’s hard to get close to someone when there’s a huge secret between them.

I connected with this novel so deeply and I raced through it in a day. I simply sat and read without music or any other distractions, that’s how engrossed I was in this family’s story. Each generation had it’s own issues to deal with. The grandparents are facing health issues and their eventual loss of each other, brought into sharp focus when grandma faints at the beach. Ricky’s son and his girlfriend are facing some huge life choices. Even great-grandparents cause a drama when Rocky’s dad lets slip that they were in a concentration camp, something Rocky’s never known. Rocky and Nick are the meat in this emotional sandwich. Catherine Newman has once again written a novel about family that is truthful, funny and life-affirming. I can easily see this being on my end of year list.

Published on 6th June by Doubleday

Meet the Author

Catherine Newman is the author of the kids’ how-to books How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, and the grown-up novels We All Want Impossible Things (Harper 2022) and Sandwich (Harper 2024). She edits the non-profit kids’ cooking magazine ChopChop and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family.