My Beautiful Terrible Pandemic Life

Book excerpt: This poetic diary recounts one mother's struggle to contend with the pandemic's losses and accept its gifts. When the coronavirus threatened to take away everything, Amy Suardi began to record a life that suddenly felt more precious. Amidst the distress of lockdown and the trials of finding herself running a school with her five children, it was often the ordinary domestic moments that were the most poignant. Suardi's journal-keeping, in the form of micro-memoirs, poems, and short essays, turned into a discovery of hidden beauty and how even the smallest things can be openings into deeper, larger worlds. Originally published on her webpage Painting with Words, these pieces bring together the first seven months of the pandemic and include Suardi's experience of marching for racial justice, witnessing high school end for her daughter without prom, graduation, or even hugs, and dropping her off at a hollowed-out Covid-era college campus. Sometimes light-hearted, sometimes meditative, Suardi's writing has been noted for its "gentleness intertwined with intensity of emotion" and its "keen perception of the moment observed." Whether the works are read individually or together, this genre-defying collection creates a pointillist portrait of one woman's experience of what was lost in the pandemic, and perhaps most of all, what was found.