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. 

Best of the Decade: Alternate List

Photo by Marcin Gala, from Burkhard Bilger's "In Deep"

I had fun doing “Best of the Decade.” But skimming the crème de la crème off ten years’ worth of New Yorker reporting pieces wasn’t easy. Narrowing the list to just twelve was agony. I was forced to discard many wonderful articles, including some personal favorites. To atone for my ruthless selection process, I’ve decided to compile a second list – twelve more excellent pieces that could easily have made the first list, if there’d been room. Here are my picks, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead,” November 26, 2012 (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). 

2. Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep,” April 21, 2014 (“One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back”). 

3. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“I walked into the site, through smooth gray-brown gravel mounds, serene and raked as Zen gardens, graded to the angle of repose, so that no rocks slide. Like blast shields, the mounds blocked the view; their shapes, which can be seen in whole only from the air, form a coded alphabet of charm stone, dog bone, cross, and adze. A ramp sloped up to the east, to the top of a bulwark, against which leaned massive ceramic stelae”).

4. William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead,” May 31, 2010 (“To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed ‘La Familia’ ”).

5. Aleksandar Hemon, “Mapping Home,” December 5, 2011 (“I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements”).

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Flip Side,” November 29, 2010 (“But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color”).

7. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart,” April 18, 2011 (“The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz, “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

9. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” October 29 & November 5, 2012 (“Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle,” March 23, 2015 (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped”).

11. Gabrielle Hamilton, “The Lamb Roast,” January 17, 2011 (“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”).

12. Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . .’ The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible”).

Gabrielle Hamilton on the Closing of Prune

Gabrielle Hamilton (Photo by Phillip Montgomery)

Even though I’ve never met Gabrielle Hamilton, nor dined at her restaurant Prune, I feel I know her. I know her through her marvelous “The Lamb Roast” – one of my favorite New Yorker “Personal History” pieces. Hamilton is an excellent writer. When her “My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?” appeared in The New York Times Magazine yesterday, I immediately sat down and read it. It’s a moving, frustrated, worried, reflective response to the coronavirus-mandated closing of Prune. The romance of owning and operating a small Manhattan bistro is still there:

Even after seven nights a week for two decades, I am still stopped in my tracks every time my bartenders snap those metal lids onto the cocktail shakers and start rattling the ice like maracas. I still close my eyes for a second, taking a deep inhale, every time the salted pistachios are set afire with raki, sending their anise scent through the dining room. I still thrill when the four-top at Table 9 are talking to one another so contentedly that they don’t notice they are the last diners, lingering in the cocoon of the wine and the few shards of dark chocolate we’ve put down with their check.

But the reality behind that romance is stark:

There used to be enough extra money every year that I could close for 10 days in July to repaint and retile and rewire, but it has become increasingly impossible to leave even a few days of revenue on the table or to justify the expense of hiring a professional cleaning service for this deep clean that I am perfectly capable of doing myself, so I stayed late and did it after service. The sludge of egg yolk seeped through the coverall, through my clothes to my skin, matted my hair and speckled my goggles as my shock registered: It has always been hard, but when did it get this hard?

Will Prune survive? The situation is fragile, the answer unclear. Hamilton says,

For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured. These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable. But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.

Of the many writers’ responses to the pandemic that I’ve read over the past six weeks or so, Hamilton’s piece on the closing of Prune is one of the most memorable.

Interesting Emendations: Gabrielle Hamilton's "The Lamb Roast"

Do you remember these lines?

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.

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

They’re from Gabrielle Hamilton’s wonderful memory piece "The Lamb Roast" (The New Yorker, January 17, 2011). They are, in their rich simplicity, examples of my idea of the ideal sentence. I was looking for them when I recently read Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter (2011), in which a variation of “The Lamb Roast” appears as Chapter 1. I found them. They’re different from the New Yorker lines. They now read:

On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie’s in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams’s Mobil on the New Hope side. [My emphasis]

So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. [My emphasis]

In the first sentence, “we piled in the car” has been deleted, “ate” has been changed to “had,” “in New Jersey” has been changed to “in Lambertville, on the Jersey side,” “then filled up the tank” has been changed to “but then we got gas for the car,” and “in Pennsylvania” has been changed to “on the New Hope side.”

In the second sentence, “The day before the party, we drove” has been changed to “So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy,” “out along” has been changed to just “out,” “winding roads” has been changed to “winding country roads,” and “past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works” has been changed to “past Black’s Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works.”

I’m pleased to see that those glorious names – Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’s Mobil, Black’s Christmas tree farm, LaRue bottle works – remain untouched, except that the “R” in “LaRue” is now lowercase. It’s the marvelous specificity of these great names that, for me, makes the sentences so alive. The New Yorker versions are simpler; I prefer them. Both versions are excellent, illustrating the truth of William Strunk’s old adage: “the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete” (The Elements of Style).  

January 17, 2011 Issue

Gabrielle Hamilton’s succulent “The Lamb Roast,” in this week’s issue, is an 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. Yes, it’s nostalgia, but it’s exquisite nostalgia, filled with “people and fireflies and laughter.” Some of the details are amazing, e.g., her mother’s breath (“exhale of wine, vinaigrette, and tangerine”), a lion tamer’s ass (“high, round, and firm, like two Easter hams”), a Coke machine that “glowed like something almost religious.”

I relished the specificity of Hamilton’s writing, e.g., the names of local businesses (Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’s Mobil, Cal’s Collision Repair, Black’s Christmas tree farm, the LaRue bottle works, Johnson’s apple orchard). There’s poetry in those names – you can feel it in the way Hamilton uses them; it’s almost as if her memoir emerges from these names. Consider this inspired passage:

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.

In “The Lamb Roast,” Hamilton shows a love of language. She works its colors and textures into lyrical, sensual constructions. Here are two examples:

It was a lush setting. The beer, wine, and soda chilled in the creek, and the weeping willows bent their branches down over the water.

The sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminaries, 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.

Writing like that – I devour!