“The orchard” by Theresa Weir is a memoir of her life on the farm with her young husband. It is simultaneously a love story, a man versus nature battle, and a description of small town life. The story starts when Theresa, twenty-one years old and working at her Uncle Jim’s bar—meets the gorgeous Adrian Curtis, a farmer who works on his family’s apple farm and has a reputation of coming from a “cursed” background (various members of his family died in tragic ways, while the farm had its own set of troubles). While her uncle advises Theresa to avoid getting involved with Adrian, Theresa won’t listen and ultimately marries him. Soon enough, Theresa and Adrian are living at his family’s farm. While adjusting to her new life, Theresa has conflicts with Adrian—who shows himself to be less mature than Theresa expected—and his mother Ruth, who refuses to accept her into the family. As Theresa describes her current life, she devotes separate chapters to her old one—sharing a childhood where her mother is left by her father, and enters into various doomed relationships with different men. Ultimately her mother’s experience has a great impact on the author’s life, as Theresa’s attachment to Adrian is tied to her own wish of having a stable family. Overall, this is a very touching memoir. It’s much shorter that I thought it was going to be and a pretty quick read. The author shares a lot of personal details, and touches upon themes like loneliness, resilience, and the sheer unpredictability of life. The ending was not what I expected, but, in hindsight, exactly what the author hinted at throughout the book. There’s a decent amount of foreshadowing hidden in the text. Between exploring the different relationships—the author’s and her husband’s, the son’s and his dominating family’s, the young bride’s and her disapproving mother-in-law’s, the single-mother’s and the mature-beyond-her-year’s daughter’s, and the lonely uncle and the adventurous niece’s—I found this to be a very human story with a few lessons to it. If I had to characterize this memoir in one word, it would be “insightful.” Published by Grand Central Publishing. September 2011. 240 pages. List price $24.99
