Katherine May’s winter begins on a beach in September. The weather is fine, she is approaching forty, and she is celebrating with friends. Then her husband becomes seriously ill and is hospitalized with appendicitis. Looking back at photographs, the sunny seaside and what followed seem scarcely to belong to the same day.
Her life had already reached a point of change. Before her husband became ill, she had decided to leave her university job. Later her own health deteriorated, and difficulties at school led her son to withdraw temporarily. Before one problem was settled, another arrived. Knowing in principle that life cannot always run smoothly offers little preparation for the feeling that these particular days have somehow gone wrong.
Wintering begins with that dislocation. It is a memoir interwoven with travel, observations of nature, and investigations of customs. Its chapters move from September to March. Time advances, but life does not progress as it does on a résumé. Work is set aside, the household rearranged, and considerable effort spent on maintenance and waiting, with little that can be described as an accomplishment.
Published in 2020, the book accompanied many readers through the pandemic. Its subject, however, is not a shared global emergency but a household entering difficulty before those around it. Outside, people go to work and fill their calendars as usual. Inside, keeping pace has become impossible. “Wintering” gives May a name for this condition and leads her toward actual cold.
She did not bring the North home intact
May writes about geothermal pools in Iceland and Finnish saunas. These ways of living attract her, but the book is not a succession of experiments that work beautifully. When she tries to continue enjoying saunas in Britain, her body does not cooperate. The experience goes badly.
That failure adds credibility. Wanting to learn from another place does not mean being able to transplant its life. Being attracted to a practice while reading about it and discovering what one’s body makes of it are different experiences. May does not edit out what failed to fit, leaving only a successful lifestyle transformation.
In a later interview she explained that temperature was not the whole attraction. As she understood it, sauna in some northern communities provides a regular pause in daily life: time with people close to you and a temporary withdrawal from demands. For a visitor this might be a special indulgence. For those accustomed to long winters, it can be part of an ordinary arrangement.
What deserves attention, then, is not necessarily a heated room. One way of life makes room for recovery, while another treats every interval as unused time. That difference matters more than the name of the activity. Copying the activity without changing exhausting arrangements has obvious limits.
Her northern explorations do not remain entirely within scenes of comfort. Preparing for winter involves work and advance care for the conditions of living. Appreciating cold weather does not make it easy to endure. Accepting winter has a practical side: knowing it will arrive means recognizing that summer arrangements cannot simply continue.
This matters to an already exhausted May. She had tended to experience changes in her body as interruptions and hope they would disappear so that the plan could resume. Now she tries to let the plan answer to what has changed. The writing slows accordingly. A journey need not justify itself solely by arrival; an unsuccessful attempt also deserves space.
The solstice is not a personal achievement
May also visits Stonehenge for the winter solstice. Such an occasion could easily become a scene of unquestioned revelation. Instead she is attracted to ritual and slightly embarrassed by it. She has not already committed herself to a settled faith. She wants to understand how people mark a seasonal turning together.
Talking with Krista Tippett, she discussed the Druid practitioner Philip Carr-Gomm and his humor. He did not deny that these rituals could look odd from outside. May found that companionable. She could take a need seriously without pretending all her doubts had gone away.
The incomplete conviction gives Wintering a different voice from a motivational manual. This is not an author who has found the answer and returned to instruct the rest of us. She is still trying things, still awkward, and unsure whether a ritual will eventually become part of her own life.
The solstice matters partly because it does not depend on performance. It arrives whether work is going well or badly. During a difficulty with no predictable end, such a marker can briefly release someone from a private progress chart. Besides whether a task is finished or a body recovering, the world has other changes to notice, and other people can notice them together.
But the book’s seasonal pattern is not a medical timetable. Lengthening daylight does not ensure that personal difficulty will diminish on schedule. May’s metaphor is most moving when it gives an isolated experience a shape that can be communicated. Turn it into a promise of recovery and it loses its proportion. Problems that remain in spring still need concrete responses.
When a child leaves school, whose time changes?
Another strand is harder to organize than travel. May’s son is having a very difficult time at school, and she eventually withdraws him temporarily. She does not present herself as a mother who has always dreamed of educating at home. On the contrary, she needs time of her own and had never intended to live this way.
That makes the decision substantial. Acknowledging the child’s distress means accepting consequences for her own schedule. Without school, the daytime cannot continue as before. Money and energy have to be reconsidered. This is not a polished panorama of calmly selecting an alternative education. A family discovers that the existing arrangement no longer works, pauses it, and looks for the next step.
May later told Tippett that her son had returned to a different school and was doing well. Looking back, she especially valued his discovery that telling his parents about distress could produce an actual response. This clarifies what the pause accomplished. It did more than reduce pressure; it changed what asking for help meant.
Placed beside the northern journeys, this moves the book from private feeling toward shared life. Making room for oneself might begin by canceling a commitment. Making room for a child can require time one does not have to spare. Both might be called recovery, but they involve different work.
The unresolved difficulty is worth retaining. Caring for others and preserving oneself do not automatically balance simply because both matter. May can describe this adjustment because a family made arrangements and bore consequences. Another household might need a different solution or more support from school and elsewhere. The first thing to learn is to identify the problem seriously, not reproduce her decision.
The book cannot winter on our behalf
Part of Wintering’s appeal lies in its gentler language for interruption. Some readers object that leaving work, traveling, and rearranging family life require resources not everyone possesses. “Anyone can take a little time” does not answer this. For some people the missing thing is not willingness to rest but someone to pay the bills when earnings stop.
Yet aspects of May’s writing resist turning the book into a catalogue of comfortable living. The sauna disagrees with her, childcare disrupts plans, ritual brings embarrassment. These failures remain. She offers life being worked out, rather than a style ready for imitation.
This allows a more accurate question. Whether travel helped her and whether everyone can afford it are different matters. We can accept the former without making it a universal prescription. Likewise, recognizing that a pause from work may be necessary must not obscure the fact that someone may lack that option. A memoir helps us understand an experience; it cannot replace arrangements that give more people care.
The book’s wandering has a cost too. It moves from family to traditional stories to nature, and readers wanting systematic argument may find the threads loose. But these excursions keep difficulty from shrinking to the single question of what is wrong with the narrator. May still watches the weather, wonders about other lives, and attempts something that does not work. Illness and interruption have not exhausted her curiosity.
That may be the best reason to read slowly. A season that appears unproductive acquires detail, and adjusting a life proves far less simple than telling someone to slow down. From September to March, the changes are not only outdoors. Some things are relinquished, some relationships rearranged, and some questions remain unanswered. Together they make these days a part of life, without waiting for normality to return before they count.