Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen, 2006
A ninety-year-old in a nursing home looks back on the Depression summer he jumped a circus train and learned what an elephant already knew.
Sara Gruen
Gruen wrote the first draft of this novel for National Novel Writing Month, a month-long novel dare, then spent years researching Depression-era railroad circuses.
Feels like nostalgia, memory and longing.
The moment you stop knowing your own age without counting.
When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m—you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it. Books by Sara Gruen
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