Book Club

5 takeaways from Book Club’s author talk with Nina MacLaughlin

The best-selling author and literary columnist joined Boston.com to discuss her new essay book, "Winter Solstice."

By Zipporah Osei

January 4, 2024

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There is a grief and warmth to the darkness of the winter months that gets author Nina MacLaughlin’s creative spirit stirring. In her latest essay book, “Winter Solstice,” she explores what happens as we lose light and the temperatures start to dip. 

“The winter does sort of return us to — in the deepest, barely recognizable way — the animal in us. That deep fear of am I going survive? That survival instinct gets stoked,” she told Boston.com readers at a recent virtual author discussion. “I love winter. I really do, and I particularly love the lead-up in November into this dark moment. It’s my absolute favorite time of year. There is that…sublime moment where it’s so beautiful that it’s frightening.”

The best-selling author and literary columnist joined Boston.com to discuss the book, a companion piece to her 2020 essay, “Summer Solstice,” with Jacob Fricke, bookseller at Hello Hello Books.

“Winter Solstice” touches on a far-ranging collection of topics including the mythicism of winter celebrations, changing urban landscape, archaeology, childhood memory, and more. The book was described by Fricke as being filled with a “density of sensory detail.”

“I love how kinetically, how seamlessly the essay leaps from subject to subject,” Fricke said. “The overall pace of the essay feels like a kind of flight.”

The book builds up to the solstice over time, starting with the weeks before and moving to the “crescendo of the solstice,” MacLaughlin said, so that the reader starts at a distance and has the feeling of “getting closer to the thing itself, getting to the heart of the thing.”

“Winter tells us, more than petaled spring, or hot-grassed summer, or fall with its yellow leaves, that we are mortal. In the frankness of its cold, in the mystery of its deep-blue dark, the place in us that knows of death is tickled, focused, stoked,” MacLaughlin writes in the essay. “The angels sing on the doorknobs and others sing from the abyss. The sun has been in retreat since June, and the heat inside glows brighter in proportion to its absence. We make up for the lost light in the spark that burns inside us.”

The author said she chose an essay format for “Winter Solstice” because it allowed her to meditate on her feelings about the season without the pressure to discover an answer.

“How does an essay offer revelation and keep that kind of questioning spirit? Maybe the revelation is the question. Or the reminder that ecstasy as possible, the reminder that joy is possible, the reminder that mystery is possible,” MacLaughlin said. “There are things that we’re not going to solve, [things that] we can try to get close and try to put words to, and we won’t get there. But we can keep trying.”

MacLaughlin and Fricke discussed how she finds internal warmth during the coldest months of the year, why she likes to dissect every line she writes, and want kinds of books draw her in. Read on for takeaways from their discussion or watch the video below and sign up for more Book Club updates.

The “ecstasy” of winter makes it MacLaughlin’s favorite time of year.

Although she also wrote an ode to the warmer months in her previous essay, “Summer Solstice,” MacLaughlin shared that winter is her favorite time of year. She especially likes the build-up to the season as the days grow colder and darker. During winter, the writer said she feels more present in her body and more conscious of the air she breathes — literally.

“It’s that feeling of taking a breath in [of] that cold air, and you’re feeling it in your body in a way that I don’t think you feel in July or August,” she said. Less time spent outdoors also makes her more aware of her natural environment when she does take the time to be outside in winter. 

“The deep blue glow of the November and December sunset…There’s something that’s so amazingly beautiful about it, and behind it, there’s a force of terror, too,” she said.

MacLaughlin wrote these essays during the first winter of the pandemic.

The author described writing “Winter Solstice” during a “global moment of grief and fear.” While the darkness and fear of the time undoubtedly influenced the essays, there is still warmth in her writing. MacLaughlin returned to the essays as she was putting together the book to elevate, elongate, and deepen them. Now, as she speaks with readers at her author talks, she said she feels able to process the grief in a new light and “approach it with curiosity.” 

“It’s interesting because we’re in this new moment of global grief and fear. Changed, but still this fraught moment,” she said. “And so it has been so good to gather with people and talk about the book. I do think very deeply that the dark has something to offer us. There is something to be found there and it’s not in such a way that romanticizes the darkness, nor ignoring it. Being able to find vitality, that life force within the fear.”

As a reader, MacLaughlin gravitates toward “embodied” writing.

MacLaughlin said she makes a lot of time for reading and has read novels with stories so interesting that feels like she’s watching an episode of television, but what she looks for above all these is writing that challenges her. With literature, the author said she wants to feel as though she’s reading someone “pushing up against the limits of language.”

“I want my center of gravity to be changed,” she said, adding, “As I get older as a reader, I feel like I’m better now sensing into when I’m reading someone’s writing from the front of their brain, which can be very intelligent and very sharp, but I want to read where you know that it’s coming from somewhere else…like [an] unnameable elsewhere.”

Every sentence of “Winter Solstice” was carefully crafted.

While some writers prefer to write through a piece before going back to make edits, MacLaughlin said she regularly rereads her work when she sits down to write. It helps familiarize her with the themes of her work and puts special attention to the precision and flow of each line. Fricke, the discussion moderator, noted that reading the book felt like “taking flight,” a sensation that MacLaughlin said she hopes to capture in all her work.

“I am a sucker for cadence, and so the movement of a sentence feels very important to me. I think if you are feeling kind of like in flight, I think [that’s due] partly to the rhythm of the sentences, the repetition, honestly to the point of a nursery rhyme,” she said. “It’s sort of not intentional. I’m not sitting there like, okay, this is what I’m going to do. But [there is] that spell-like feeling…like let me cast a spell here to be elsewhere. Come with me elsewhere.”

MacLaughlin returns to seasonal reflections in her work all the time.

As she’s gotten older, the author said she’s become more observant of the world outside herself, which has made her more appreciative of the seasons and the changes they bring.

“I do think about the character of each month, the spirit of it, the heat of it, the personality. I think that the way that light lands on us and shifts throughout the year…it’s really important. It really, I think, affects us in profound ways…that gets to the animal in us,” she said. “For me, in March, when the light starts flooding back, I get really edgy. My mood takes a nosedive, whereas in November, where it’s darkening, darkening, darkening, I feel like my fullest self.”

Her meditation on seasonal changes happens so naturally that it easily bleeds into her writing.

“For the stuff that I’ve been writing about, I feel so lucky because it’s just the stuff that my own brain feels fired up to get to know better,” she said.

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