Crib Notes: What to Read When Nothing Goes to Plan

5 books to take refuge in when the chaos of family life reaches fever pitch.

Welcome to the very first Crib Notes of 2025!

I began the year with soaring ambitions for decluttering and strength training, as well as plans for frosty winter walks to keep the winter blues at bay. All of this was swept aside when everyone became sick, sick and sick again. There was not a single week in January, during which everyone was well. The full catalogue of ailments included: Generic Back to School Bug (my eldest son), severe menstrual migraines (me), Actual Flu (my youngest son and then me again) and finally noro virus (everyone). It was so terrible, it was funny… except it wasn’t funny. It was fucking miserable and by the end of the month I was wondering what parent-on-parent crime I'd committed to get this apocalypse-scale karmic pay-back (Had I gloated about swerving nits or something?). Somehow, in spite of four weeks under house arrest, either feeling totally rotten or tediously restless, I managed not to lose my mind. As ever, books offered entertainment and an escape hatch.

Taking inspiration from my absolute shitshow of a month, I am recommending five books to take refuge in when things are Not Going to Plan.

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Another Marvellous Thing by Laurie Colwin

This 1980s gem introduces us to New Yorkers, Billy and Frank, who are happily married – but not to each other. When they meet at a cocktail party, they do not yet know they are embarking on a love affair, but soon the realisation hits them. Billy is a delightful antithesis to ‘mistresses in French movies who rendezvous at cafes in expensive hotels and take their cigarette cases out of alligator handbags’. She is grouchy, often serious and a bad dresser. She considers Frank an ‘extraordinary irritant’, but is, nevertheless, an insatiable kisser. Frank is older; he is indifferent to Billy’s interest in the Medieval Wool Trade, enjoys making money and has a perfumed, party-giving interior-designer for a wife. He feels perpetually confused and tongue-tied by Billy. There’s nothing salacious in Another Marvellous Thing, which pithily mocks the clichés of lovers in novels, basking in a breathless afterglow. Instead, this is a book about two people who unexpectedly and unintentionally fall for each other, taking the reader from the beginning of their romance to its inevitable ending. Later, after they have parted, the book gives way to Billy’s experience of early motherhood. Colwin writes about birth and the anguished, first flushes of maternal love with a glittering truthfulness, which feels ahead of its time for 1986. Gazing at her baby son in neo-natal intensive care after a difficult labour, only able to see him during visiting hours, she tells a nurse, ‘This is like having an affair with a married man’. Another Marvellous Thing is a wise and wryly funny novel about the absurdities of attraction and the bittersweet silliness of the human heart.

When to Read It: I have always found Laurie Colwin’s effervescent writing a tonic for tough times. When I was debilitatingly sick during pregnancy and struggled to read, only Colwin’s droll romantic comedy Happy All the Time could lift me out of lethargy. Last September, when both of my children had Back-To-School-Lurgy, I read Colwin’s Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object. And so, in January, during my third week of house arrest, as one child recovered from flu and the other succumbed to a vomiting bug, I reached for Another Marvellous Thing. It was exactly what I needed.

How to Read It: The gorgeous (and mercifully short at 144 pages) paperback edition (buy it here), newly reissued by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

What to Read Next: I highly recommend Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time, as well as Katherine Heiny’s story collections Single, Carefree, Mellow and Games and Rituals (read my reviews here, here and here). Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to delving into another recently reissued Colwin gem: Family Happiness.

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Greatest of All Time by Alex Allison