By Lindsay Johnstone

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A full twelve lunar cycles have passed since the hardback edition of Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky was published, and what events that moon of ours has witnessed.

We look up to steady ourselves in times of earthbound tumult and trauma – be they personal, political or otherwise – hoping that the cycles of our “timeless” moon may “offer a sense of return and renewal.” Hope.

Caro Giles gives character to that moon using a combination of Celtic, Anglo Saxon, Old English and Medieval names as chapter and subheadings. These moons offer her a paradigm through which to understand her changed reality. The wild beauty of the Northumberland landscape also serves as backdrop and temporary salve to the challenges she experiences. It’s a life lived not just on the coast, but on the margins. The edges.

For though it’s ever-changing across its month-long cycle, it’s predictable. The kind of change we can cope with. Even when stubborn clouds obscure it for days and sometimes weeks at a time, we know intrinsically it is still there. Still waxing, waning and causing us to catch our breath when it appears suddenly bold, bright and big like an unexpected gift. We forget, momentarily.

We are carried along with Giles as she tackles the challenges of a tumultuous year in this deft, affecting memoir. She is recently divorced; a midlife woman finding her bearings as a newly-single parent to four girls, some of whom have complex needs. Her daughters – the Mermaid along with the Whirlwind, the Caulbearer and the Littlest One – are her relenting focus.

She is, though, also trying to work out how to be a woman in her own right. Writing has become a radical act of self care where stolen candle-lit moments in the early hours enable her to nurture herself alongside her daughters.

In these hours when the world is sleeping, I feel invincible. I am a mother of course, but I am also the promise of my own future of who I can become.

The spectre of COVID looms over the narrative, infecting these lives regardless of whether two pink lines have appeared on a lateral flow test. Those lines will appear eventually, but for the first two thirds of this memoir Giles is concerned less with a novel virus and more about mothering and managing the growing complexities of her girls’ needs.

Her eldest has long been plagued by chronic conditions Giles chooses not to name. This daughter finds relief in the tidal waters of the Northumberland coast, along with that harried mother of hers. This daughter is tethered to her mother while the other three continue to visit their father; a man whose presence in the narrative is shady. Disappointing.

Giles’s portrayal of the end of her marriage is searing in its honesty while the passages depicting her youth – a London life that carries her to adulthood and marriage on a swell of heady optimism and music – are both evocative and prescient. Neither, it seems, can last.

This sensitive, raw and poetic exploration of motherhood, caring, divorce and identity asks important questions. What becomes of your personhood when the needs of others must come first? Who do you become in the eyes of others when you and your family do not fit the conventional mould?

I dream and I worry as I sip my tea, and somehow the darkness soothes me, this mother who has birthed four daughters, and must now raise them in a world that has revealed itself to be harsh and relentless. I worry about how I can show them magic and calm, when they have already seen cruel and unfair.

Twelve Moons takes its place alongside other recent nature memoirs such as Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone and her 2021 debut, Thin Places, which are similarly drenched in the power of ancient ritual and the moon as ways to process trauma.

There is a magnetic pull, it seems, in these and other recent titles towards the old ways, perhaps as a means to recover from and resist the horrors that bombard us. It’s been captured, too, by recent non-fiction releases such as Slow Seasons by Rosie Steer and Nature’s Calendar: The British Year in 72 Micro Seasons by Kiera Chapman, Rowan Jaines and Lullah Ellender.

In this memoir, there is a desire, too, for truth. A compulsion to debunk the myth of the parent-carer. Yes, she is maternal. But she is also raging. She is compassionate but can also be selfish. It’s a much-needed, honest portrayal of caring that situates this book alongside Penny Wincer’s memoir, Tender: The Imperfect Act of Caring, where her experience of being a single parent-carer was also so profoundly expressed.

Just like these mothers, then, the moon is so much more than a benign, always-there presence and Giles’s story serves to reconnect us to its many faces. The many faces of the mother. She draws lines between mother earth, the innate femininity of the lunar calendar and, of course, between those fierce women who are bound to their daughters.

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About our contributor

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