The Orchard: A Memoir
Weir's memoir is not only the story of her struggle as a troubled youth, but also of her acceptance into the hard life of a farmer's wife under an oppressive and controlling family matriarch. The Orchard is a love letter to her husband and to the life that they built together, as well as a love letter to nature and what nature will yield. It is also a tale of caution regarding the great harm that is done with pesticides and aggressive farming. Weir tells her story with grace, compassion, and unflinching honesty.
Description
The Orchard is the story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the golden boy of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards seem to be cursed. Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected.
Rejected by her husband's family as an outsider, she slowly learns for herself about the isolated world of farming, pesticides, environmental destruction, and death, even as she falls more deeply in love with her husband, a man she at first hardly knew and the land that has been in his family for generations. She becomes a reluctant player in their attempt to keep the codling moth from destroying the orchard, but she and Adrian eventually come to know that their efforts will not only fail but will ultimately take an irreparable toll.
Praise for The Orchard: A Memoir
A hypnotic tale of place, people, and of Midwestern family roots that run deep, stubbornly hidden, and equally menacing-THE ORCHARD is sublime and enchanting, like a reflecting pool, touch the surface and watch the ripples carry you away.
--Jamie Ford, NYT bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
The Orchard is a lovely book in all the ways that really matter, one of those rare and wonderful memoirs in which people you've never met become your friends. I read it in a single sitting, lost in the story, and by the time I put it down, I was amazed by Weir's ability to evoke such genuine emotion. Read it: you'll be glad you did.—Nicholas Sparks
