Pig Years

An itinerant farmhand's account of the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth.

As a seasonal farmer in upstate New York and Vermont—living hand to mouth, but in love with the land and its creatures—Ellyn Gaydos understands the delicate balance between loss and gain. In choosing such work, Gaydos recognizes her role in cycles bigger than herself; yearning to be a mother, she recognizes, too, how new life is mirrored in everything that surrounds her: livestock, full moons, endless acres of green that seem to blossom overnight. But there's tragedy on the farms as well: fields gone barren and animals meeting their end too soon. While small farms struggle to survive in the face of industrial competition, low wages, and loneliness, Gaydos takes us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are turned into star-bright symbols of hope, and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, and the slaughter.
 
In shimmering prose that is as lyric as it is stark, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux.

“Pig Years is a lush account of the everyday splendor of small farm work, from the soil to the slop, from the blades of machinery to the bodies of animals in rut. It is a love song to this labor, and to the physicality of the world.” —Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had and Notes from No Man’s Land

“Ellyn Gaydos does the rare, important work of capturing rural America not in the shadow of urban spaces but standing in its own light. Pig Years gets right to the severe truths that farmers know: Fresh blood is bright, butchers are often gentle souls, and survival is always a temporary state. Gaydos writes with the exquisite directness of nature herself.” —Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland

“The rhythms of Ellyn Gaydos’s new memoir Pig Years are the rhythms of nature, of life itself and, yes, death, too. No wonder the book, with its slow burn of uncomfortable facts and sober truth, burrows under the reader’s skin.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Chances Are