10 Best Personal History Pieces: #4 Gabrielle Hamilton's "The Lamb Roast"

Photo from Gabrielle Hamilton's "The Lamb Roast"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Gabrielle Hamilton’s succulent “The Lamb Roast” (January 17, 2011).

Certain New Yorker pieces stick in my memory. This is one of them. It’s Hamilton’s enchanting evocation of her rural Pennsylvania youth, when she lived with her family in a “wild castle built into the ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill.” It centers on an annual party her father threw, featuring a spring-lamb roast. Is it nostalgia? Yes, but it’s bittersweet nostalgia. Hamilton remembers the lamb roast as one of her family’s last happy times before her mother and father separated.

The piece unfolds in five untitled sections. Section one introduces the subject: “We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring-lamb roast, and we laid out four or five whole little guys over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people.” This section also describes her family and her family home. Hamilton is the youngest of five (the others are Jeffrey, Todd, Melissa, and Simon). She says of her mother,

My mother was French, and she wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren. I remember the smell of sulfur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist, and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us to eat briny, wrinkled olives, small birds, and cheeses that looked as if they might bear Legionnaires’ disease. She kicked our cat away from her ankles and said, “Ah là là là là là là, the problem with kittens is that they become cats!” I sat in her aproned lap every night after dinner and felt the treble of her voice down my spine while breathing in her exhale of wine, vinaigrette, and tangerine.

Of her father, she writes,

My dad could not cook. He was a set designer for theatrical and trade shows, and he had a “design-build” studio in Lambertville, New Jersey, where he had grown up, and where his own father had been the local doctor. My father went away to college and then to art school. In 1964, he bought the old skating rink at the end of South Union Street, with its enormous domed ceiling and colossal wooden floor, and turned it into his studio, an open work space where scenery as big as the prow of a ship could be constructed, erected, painted, and then broken down and shipped to New York. He built the sets for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and we would zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws, canvas, and paint. We ran up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out as if in a carpet store, and shoved our arms down into fifty-gallon oil drums full of glitter.

Hamilton describes the town where they lived:

In our town, you could walk back and forth between two states by crossing the Delaware River. On weekend mornings, we piled in the car and ate breakfast at Smutzie’s, in New Jersey, then filled up the tank at Sam Williams’s Mobil, in Pennsylvania. After school, I walked to Jersey and got lessons at Les Parsons’s music shop. My home town has become, mostly, a sprawl of developments and subdivisions, gated communities that look like movie sets that will be taken down at the end of the shoot. But, when I was young, it was mostly farmland—rolling fields, rushing creeks when it rained, thick woods, and hundred-year-old stone barns. You had to ride your bike about a mile down a dark country road thick with night insects to find even a plugged-in Coke machine. Outside Cal’s Collision Repair, that machine glowed like something almost religious.

Note the specificity of the place names – Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’ Mobil, Les Parson’s music shop, Cal’s Collision Repair. It’s one of my favorite aspects of the piece.

Section two describes the preparations for the lamb roast party. It contains this gorgeous passage:

Jeffrey had a 1957 Chevy truck, with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy’s shoes with no socks, hanging on to the railing, letting the wind blast my face. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the little patches of bracing coolness, and the sudden bright warmth, and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. Finally, we got to Johnson’s apple orchard, where we picked up wood for the fire.

That “The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works” is inspired. 

Section three describes the kids’ sleep-out by the fire on the night before the party. Hamilton remembers the thrill of being “packed into my sleeping bag right next to my siblings.” She says, “I felt cocooned by the smell of wood smoke, the anchoring voices, giggles, farts, and squeals of disgust. This whole perfect night, when everything is pretty much intact, is where I sometimes want the story to stop.”

 

Section four is the sad part. It begins, “I had no idea the divorce was coming.” It contains this brilliant sentence: “It took more than a year to fully dismantle the family, but I felt as if I had fallen asleep by the lamb pit one night and woken up the next morning to the debris of a brilliant party, a bare cupboard, and an empty house.” The lamb roast is the family’s turning point – the last glowing embers of happiness before they turn to ash.

In section five, Hamilton cuts back to the party:

In the morning, we awoke and found in the pit a huge bed of glowing coals, perfect for roasting lamb. My dad threw coils of sweet Italian sausage onto the grill. He split open loaves of bread to toast over the coals, and, for breakfast, instead of Cocoa Puffs and cartoons, we sat up in our sleeping bags, reeking of smoke, and ate these giant, crusty, charred sausage sandwiches. Afterward, we rolled up our pants and walked barefoot into the frigid stream, built a little corral with river rocks, and stocked it with jugs of Chablis and cases of Heineken, cream soda, and root beer.

She describes the roast:

The lambs were placed over the coals head-to-toe-to-head, the way you’d put a bunch of kids having a sleepover into bed. A heavy metal garden rake was kept next to the pit to move the spent coals to the edges as the day passed and the ashes built up, revealing the glowing red embers beneath. The lambs roasted slowly, their blood dripping onto the coals with a hypnotic hiss. My dad basted them by dipping a thick branch covered with a big swab of cheesecloth into a paint can filled with olive oil, crushed rosemary, garlic, and chunks of lemons. He mopped the lambs with soft careful strokes, as you might paint a new sailboat. All day, as we did our chores, the smells of gamy lamb, applewood smoke, and rosemary-garlic marinade commingled.

The piece ends magnificently:

The meadow filled with people and fireflies and laughter—just as my father had imagined—and the lambs on their spits were hoisted onto the men’s shoulders, as if in a funeral procession, and set down on the makeshift tables to be carved. Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat.

My summary doesn’t do this great piece justice. I’ve omitted many wonderful details. Read the whole thing. I guarantee it will stay with you.