LIKE me, Sarah Moss grew up with a love for ballet books, but with two left feet; so we were free to twirl around our bedrooms without ever having to discover the pain and sacrifice involved in being a professional ballerina. In Ripeness, Moss explores that dynamic between fantasy and reality in a vivid story about the lifelong process of growing up.

Ripeness is told from the point of view of Edith, who looks back on her very early adulthood in the 1960s. She remembers the year between school and Oxford when she was commissioned by her mother to travel to rural Italy to see her ballerina sister through the final weeks of an unplanned pregnancy. Although she is a reluctant conscript on this mission, there is a real sense that the trip is a transformative adventure in a life thus far sheltered.

As Edith accompanies her sister through the experience of giving birth, of giving up her child, and of never quite becoming the ballerina that she wanted to be, she wonders “do dance teachers know how much harm they do when they teach dancers to ignore pain? It’s hardly a survival skill, it’s the opposite.”

Ripeness is a novel of contrasts. Edith’s sadness at the fragility and tragedy of her sister’s life gives way in later years to a growing sense of joy and satisfaction in her own. As she grows older, Edith becomes a woman who is not performing for an audience, but has found her own voice. She is pleased by the number of times she has said yes, “though women are mostly advised to say no”.

At first, Ripeness seems to refer to the pregnancy, but, as the story progresses, the title speaks just as much of Edith’s life, of mortality, freedom, and the art of seizing opportunities “we are all wanderers. We all live dangerously; the brave thing is to know it.”
 

The Ven. Catherine Pickford is the Archdeacon of Northolt, in the diocese of London.

Ripeness
Sarah Moss
Picador £20
(978-1-5290-3549-0)
Church Times Bookshop £18