“Sometimes I think I am going to hell,” a pig farmer once confided to Ellyn Gaydos. He went on to inquire, “What do you think of raising animals for money?” Gaydos’s reply was quick and succinct: “They have to come from somewhere.”
Pig Years, Gaydos’s memoir of her time as a farmhand on small farms in the rural Northeast of the U.S., is similarly unapologetic and sure-footed. Here is an author who can transport readers into the lush fecundity of raising and tending to pigs, but without the omission of the brutality of their ultimate slaughter. Pigs, even those so lovingly bred as Gaydos’s animals (at one point she even bakes them special cakes with peanut butter in the place of frosting), are part of the unrelenting cycle of nature, whose very circularity depends on death. The rhythm and inevitability of it, so lyrically rendered by Gaydos, form the music of this book.
