I enjoyed this but was a bit surprised by the extent of content related to trees. Not necessarily a bad thing--but definitely not what I was expecting.

Omega Farm is a memoir that’s been on my TBR for several months, so I’m glad I was finally able to listen to the audiobook.

I felt like this memoir covered much different topics than I expected, based on the synopsis. There was A LOT more about trees and forest management than expected (does anyone expect that going into a memoir?!). And I work in the environmental field - so I love it, but just wasn’t expecting it in this book.

I think the author described her complicated and sometimes traumatic upbringing well and how that created confusing and conflicting feelings in adulthood.

Thank you NetGalley, Scribner for the gifted e-book and Simon Audio for the gifted audiobook.

A memoir that packs a wallop and is often hard to read, but intriguing and well written. For those of us dealing with some of these issues, McPhee's writing will resonate.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book and the trip back to Omega Farm.

𝐒𝐨, 𝐎𝐦𝐞𝐠𝐚 𝐅𝐚𝐫𝐦- 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐰 𝐨𝐟 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞- 𝐬𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐣𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐚𝐬: 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞.

After Martha McPhee's parents split up, her mother began seeing an unlicensed, charismatic Gestalt therapist named Dan who "worked with groups on realizing their sexual equality". It is through one of his sessions, at his clinic in a dilapidated farmhouse that her depressed mother fell in love with him. This was the point where her siblings and Dan's children got to know each other, 9 children in all and later, the baby her mother and Dan had. Summer of 1970, they traveled out west together 'crammed into a camper', big kids and little kids, staying with friends, surrounded by Dan's nude clients, hiking in the mountains, getting lost, running low on food, by the end they resembled a new family of sorts, despite Dan still being married to his wife Sally.

This natural world wasn't Martha's dream, and the blended family had its own hierarchy, with Martha and her sisters on the bottom. A world with 'shifting alliances', by 1973 this 'disorder' became their new life, with Dan holding court. A blended family, with the teenagers arguing their passionate views and shouting resentments, the adults often high or drunk, parties, debt, farming, bohemia, raising animals, communal living, friends coming and going, was the name of the game until the children grew up and moved away. How, then does Martha end up being the child who returns to the farm to care for her mother, who is in the grip of severe dementia? The fact is, she hoped to preserve the past, make a place her children could visit their grandma and one day she and all the siblings could 'retire and putter about', returning one and all to their utopia. Her hand was forced when the pandemic hit and it was the perfect solution to 'shelter in place' with her ailing mother, husband and children. She and her husband live closest, as writers and professors working from home it makes sense, but her rosey dream of sweet simplicity surrounded by nature is thwarted as the land and home makes demands. It is a grueling job. Coywolves screaming in the night, foxes hungering for the chickens they are raising, as city dwellers, there is much to learn. No longer can they defer maintenance, the farm is a mess, now that she is living on the land, the problems are alarming and many. Exterminators and plumbers aren't enough to fight the insects and repair the damages communal living created, the things people broke, the rigged repairs, years of junk piling up in barns, even an entire deck dumped in the forest. Her sisters may be right, the place may swallow her whole. Elder care is a disaster itself, and there is much that can go terribly wrong. How does she keep her mother safe and still tend to her marriage and own children, now when the whole world is unsteady?

How is she going to repair and mend things when neither she nor her mother have the means? It is like falling back through time, attempting to save the farm only now there aren't ten kids pitching in. Dan is no longer alive to invent his schemes to make money, and her mother is slowly vanishing. Childhood memories and the anxieties are returning full force. Nature seems to be turning against them as well, the bamboo forest is like a devil beneath their feet (I am now looking at the bamboo in our yard differently) , a buried oil tank leaking, a septic tank that needs to be replaced, why does she feel it's her place to fix everything? It goes all the way back to her family dynamics. All she wants is a different path for her children, so why is she doing this, when it seems everywhere she turns is nothing but bad news?

Martha wants to put her family back together, is it possible? She is deeply rooted in the past, which isn't a bad thing, necessarily. It's helped her write novels but what about secrets that have not been confronted, burying her own trauma to protect others? She surprises herself with what she lets loose in writing this book that was meant to be about her mother's forest, returning home, and the wildly complicated bamboo removal. It's a moving memoir, caring for her mother whose mind is in a similar state to the 45 acres they are living on. It is tender when she takes in all the negatives that remain from her mother's 40 years of work behind the camera. Not everything in her life was soaked in misery and anxiety, her mother and Dan were able to create an enchanted childhood within the chaos. As with any story, there are moments worth treasuring and ones they wish they could erase. In the present, life is going off the rails, depression is taking its toll on Martha, her mother is dying, she is overwhelmed and there is a lot of ugly to get through, and self-reflection. It is about interconnectedness, not just in families but in nature, in the world and how it affects us. She will plant things that will thrive and others that will die, part of being human is not knowing (always a fear inducer) what will come of our actions any more than knowing how much time we have left with those we love. It is the churning of a life, and the family role we often have a hard time shaking off and how it touches the family we create. Beautifully written.

Publication Date: September 12, 2023 Available Now

Scribner

Thank You to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for this e-digital.

This is my first time reading a book by Martha McPhee. I was drawn in by the cover and the description of the book. McPhee writes about a number of topics in this memoir. During the pandemic, she and her family, her husband and two kids, go to live with her mother on the farm she grew up on. It covers taking care of her mother who has dementia, trying to update and repair the farm, from getting rid of bamboo, to replacing a septic tank, planting a garden, and everything else that comes with owning property. It also covers the covid time struggles of finding help for her mother, the kids completing their education either online, in person, or a mixture, and trying to get her and her husband's job duties done. It is while at the farm, McPhee opens up at the abuse, her parents divorce, her step-dad abusing her, her mom not protecting her, her step-siblings, and her siblings, and their lives on the farm. It definitely is a worth while read. I read it in about a day and half.

McPhee is a thoughtful and engaging writer, covering topics familiar to many readers: abuse within a family; the pandemic and its lasting impacts on all facets of our lives; aging, cognitive decline, and the stress, expense, and tension created by that on a family; internal conflicts as we navigate between the demands and desires of close family members in disparate locations, to name a few. Despite the familiarity of these subjects, however, the author discusses them in such a way as to cause deep resonance with the reader. I am impressed by her ability (despite some moments of failure) to accomplish so much and juggle so many balls. And to overcome the familial dysfunction in which she grew up. This memoir made me want to read her fiction, about which I have heard and read much praise.

This was my first encounter with the writing of Martha McPhee. She is very good. And she knows how to tell a story. The title and cover first hooked me. They both held the promise of some sort of insight into what happened to us all during the sixties and seventies. But I wanted to also know what is happening now in regards to dealing with an aging and dementia-riddled mother who lived basically alone in the country at the family homestead they call a farm. My wife and I are nearing seventy and we have already buried too many. Of course, the book was nothing of what I had initially expected, but turned out to be so much more. I was surprised at how good and interesting this memoir really was and found myself wishing for more.

I generally know how good a book is going to be when I begin pilfering quotations and start making notes about the book as I read. This did not happen at all for me. Not this time. I was more concerned with continuing my reading and moving forward in my journey with Martha McPhee. She is quite an industrious and inquisitive person. She juggles many balls at one time. She is quite dexterous. I was quite impressed.

"…You scratch the surface, in other words—you answer the call to fix something broken in your mom’s house—and an entire ecosystem shudders and wobbles and swings into view, and yet the thread connecting healthy trees to healthy economies also emerges in a way one never would have guessed…"

Whether McPhee is busy restoring a forest, repairing a broken septic system, dealing with the pandemic of Covid 19, and witnessing the destruction of our government institutions ignited and then engaged in by the election of Donald Trump, her supreme focus remains on raising her teenage children and helping her mother live safely with her progressing and debilitating dementia. Meanwhile, she not only attacks these other missions with a vengeance she, in the process of all this, courageously exposes a family secret of the sexual abuse inflicted on her (and others) by her step-father. Though alluded to in prior books McPhee has never before publicly revealed this awful truth. McPhee’s honesty on the page is remarkable and she should be commended.

"…You grow up, you get old, you forgive. You realize we are all human…"

The point of view McPhee expresses regarding the sexual abuse by her stepfather is rather astounding. She does not look at things as judgmentally or conventional as do most others. She sees the bigger picture and somehow finds a way to forgive what has permanently scarred her. She discovers an understanding most of us are incapable of. She must be an amazing woman. I don’t know anyone like her.

"…It’s a family disease, it ripples across generations, burrows in, the secrets like seeds carried in bird droppings, lodging deep in the ground to emerge years later. If our shame silences and we can’t speak up for ourselves, how can we possibly speak up for others—for our sisters, our daughters, our nieces, our friends?"

Martha’s mother asked her four girls to love her husband Dan, their stepfather. She believed he was a good and loving man. Turns out he loved to stick his fingers where they don’t belong and was sexually obsessed with young girls. Now afflicted with dementia it was too late to ask her mother why she remained silent, why she stayed with Dan, and why the constant demands for her girls to love him. And Dan has been dead now for over twenty-five years.

"…She created a bit of a myth for herself and railed against those who didn’t see her as kind and good. Look at all I have done, she’d say. In turning a blind eye, she sacrificed us, or at least came to understand that we are complex, can hold two very different things at the same time: turn a blind eye, love our children ferociously…"

I was sad to part with Martha and her book. Disappointed at the end however, as the story must continue. Both her parents are now aging and in decline, and the farm, in contrast, is on the upswing. Lucky for us, it seems there will be more memoirs issued forth from Martha McPhee.

I enjoy Martha McPhee's writing so had to read this. There are echoes of her family of origin from this memoir in her novel, "Bright Angel Time." Beautifully written, this memoir is haunted with the ways even the most well-intentioned adults can inflict harm on children and how the adult children then live, and narrate their lives. Recommended for readers who love memoirs and good literature. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Family complications intrigue me. I especially enjoyed this book from McPhee. Her story is difficult to tell but she does so with grace. I appreciated her words and how she told us about her relationship with her mom. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. Five stars.