OMEGA FARM

A writer returns to the storied rural home where she was raised.

In her first memoir, McPhee, a novelist and fiction instructor, recounts her move, along with her husband and two teenage children, from New York City to the New Jersey farm where she had lived with her mother, stepfather, four sisters, and five stepsiblings. In March 2020, she felt the need “to shelter-in-place with my ailing mother,” who had “vanished into dementia.” The property, on 45 acres near the border with Pennsylvania, was in a state of disrepair. As McPhee began a series of increasingly involved home improvement projects—e.g., the eradication of stink bugs, the correction of some creative plumbing work—she confronted, piece by piece, a childhood that was unconventional and chaotic amid a family that prized adventure above all else, sometimes at the expense of its youngest members. Her mother, who was “raised to be beautiful—not smart,” encouraged her “four McPhee daughters” to love their stepfather, a charismatic dreamer and unlicensed Gestalt therapist who often met his clients naked in the indoor pool at the farm. An attempt to remove invasive bamboo on the property revealed the need for an expensive new septic system, and McPhee began to consider felling the ash trees in the property’s 35-acre forest to recoup the loss. This led her to the much larger project of managing the forest, a massive undertaking that involved replanting the understory and engaging a management hunter to cull sapling-eating deer. McPhee is a captivating writer, gracefully weaving together the disparate strands of familial reckoning, the eerie pandemic years, and her evolving understanding of forest ecology. One of the book’s many strengths is the author’s ability to see herself clearly: The passages in which she narrates her own bad behavior are fascinating, which is rare in the memoir genre.

A potent exploration of the complicated project of revisiting a childhood and maintaining a family legacy.