This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
The Twins – Love and Grief
by Traci Floreani
This is Tracy Floreani in central Oklahoma with a commentary on the last book in the fall 2025 High Plains Public Radio Readers Club. Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, by Margaret Renkl, is a bit hard to categorize, but it’s mostly a memoir told through a series of very short essays. The book weaves together, in roughly chronological order, episodes from Renkl’s family history in Alabama and her own everyday observations about the flora and fauna surrounding her current home in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s peppered with quirky family anecdotes, observations about human relationships to nature, big realizations about life, and lovely, whimsical illustrations by her artist brother Billy Renkl.
Now, if someone were to tell me, “Hey, you should read this book of essays about someone else’s family and the birds in their back yard,” I’d probably take a hard pass, based on that description alone. I mean, have you ever had someone relate to you details of their family history, and you realize, with no firm frame of reference for people you’ve never met, that you’re not able to followthe names or detailed connections, and maybe…you’ve even started to tune out a little bit? The sad truth is that, unless we’ve got some serious drama or tragedy in our genealogy, the mundane details about our families are usually far more interesting to us than they are to other people.
This is why I’m so impressed with any writer who can convey their family stories in a way that really makes us care. Margaret Renkl’s family does not have any more drama or tragedy than most people’s, honestly. Like almost all of her readers, she has loved and lost, has felt connected to and torn away from special places, has dealt with unexpected change, and has deep relationships with people who have made good, bad, and confusing choices. And maybe that’s what makes the book such a compelling and comforting read. It’s a personal story for her—a depiction of growing up Catholic in the deep south in an extended family, and then raising a family of her own—but it also feels like a collection of meditations and observations meant for all of us, a series of reminders on how to be truly tuned in to life, in all of its good, bad, and confusing facets. Like any good work of literature, Late Migrations speaks to the loss and beauty that occurs in every one of our lives, but also does something unexpected and new.
Beyond the what—the subject matter—of a book, the how of a book’s writing can make or break a reading experience for me. Renkl is a trained poet, and so these brief essays pop with the revelatory language of poems, helping us to see the familiar in new ways, and to put words to thoughts we’ve always held but didn’t know we needed words for. A great example of this is when she writes early in the book, “But the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.” This is an important reminder, that the undercurrent of grief is always present, and understanding its connection to love helps us navigate it a little better.
The kind of loss she writes about might be the death of a family member that completely rocks her sense of self, but it also might be the disappointment of seeing a nest of fledglings in her yard disappear before she got to watch them learn to fly. And yet the loss or the waiting for that witnessing is, in itself, such a rich piece of just being alive. This is what Late Migrations does so well: it nudges us to tune into all of those observations and our feelings about them, to move through our limited, mortal days really paying attention.
I’m Tracy Floriani thinking about grief – and love.
