Mind, Body, Forest, French: 3 non-fiction reads for #ABookADayInMay

I’ve been getting my reading done for A Book A Day in May, but not very good at fitting in writing about the books – so today we have a triple whammy. And the last three books I’ve read have all been non-fiction (and all books I’d started before the days in question).

The Immune Mind (2024) by Dr Monty Lyman

Monty is a friend of mine, and I always make sure I read a friend’s first book – but he is also a brilliant writer, which is why this is his third and I’m still pre-ordering copies. The first two were on skin and pain, and the third is on the links between the mind and the body in health – specifically between the brain, the immune system, and microbes in the gut.

This is one of those areas which feels like less of a surprise the less you know? I know basically nothing about medical science (or any science), and would have merrily assumed that the mind and body were closely interlinked in health. We all know that being ill makes us feel sad and cross, and we know that feeling low is a time when you always seem to get ill – we use terms like ‘being run down’ to cover both. But apparently this sort of casual chat was not transferred to science – until recently.

The reality is that there is no mental disorder that is not also physical, and most physical diseases have some mental element to them. We have been trained to pigeonhole disease into either one or the other, even to the extent that we visit one hospital for the body and another for the mind. I know from my experience as a doctor that there are both implicit and explicit pressures to force patients down the grooves of either ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, evem when it is clear that neither is a perfect fit.

As Monty Lyman makes clear, this is an exciting area of medical science where things are starting to change. People are beginning to challenge long-held separations between mind and body, and increasing research is being conducted into the ways our mental health and our immune system affect each other. As one snapshot, a woman with severe allergies was shown a plastic flower – and not only responded badly in my mind, but also in her physical symptoms: the brain’s expectations affect the body’s defence mechanisms.

The first part of this book explores in depth what lies behind the immune system and behind the brain’s defences, and starts to look at how these crossover. Monty Lyman explains everything very well – I don’t know if it’s just because we’re friends, but it feels like he is cheerfully encouraging me along through the more densely scientific bits. It’s more challenging that skin and pain, because I instinctively understand what those are, even if I wouldn’t have a clue how to describe or define them. The immune system? That’s further from my grasp.

As The Immune Mind continues, I enjoyed myself more and more – the case studies are really helpful for illuminating Monty’s arguments. And you can’t say he isn’t game in his research. At one point he makes himself deliberating ill, and another time takes something that causes depression. He’s immersed! As with his other books, there is a compassion and empathy to his writing that makes it feel so much more than a scientific treatise. Again, I don’t think it’s just because I know he’s a good, kind man – it is evident there on the page. Particularly when he discusses people with long-term illnesses, there is great care as well as knowledge.

In the final section, The Immune Mind has advice for how to foster good microbial health, good mental health, and good non-inflammatory health. Monty Lyman is clear that this isn’t a work of self-help – but I appreciate that he doesn’t want to leave something with such potential, personal impact as theory alone. (I’m making a list of the number of different plants I eat this week – will I make it to the target of 30? I was surprised to find that I’m on 18 after three days, so fingers crossed.)

It’s a fascinating book, beautifully written – and I believe Brits can hear some it excerpted on Radio 4 this week, fyi.

Consolations of the Forest (2011) by Sylvain Tesson

There’s some nominative determinism for you! Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson – translated from French by Linda Coverdale – is subtitled ‘alone in a cabin in the Middle Taiga’. If, like me, you don’t know where Middle Taiga is – it’s in Siberia. This isn’t a balmy woodland retreat: Tesson went to spend six months in temperatures a long way below freezing, with ever-present dangers including bears. Why? The opening paragraph dryly suggests that it is to get away from the capitalist indulgence of a supermarket shelf having fifteen types of ketchup. Later on, he gives a list:

Reasons why I’m living alone in a cabin

I talked too much
I wanted silence
Too behind with my mail and too many people to see
I was jealous of Crusoe
It’s better heated than my place in Paris
Tired of running errands
So I can scream and live naked
Because I hate the telephone and traffic noise

Consolations of the Forest takes the form of diary entries over the time he is ‘alone’. I was surprised by how very many visitors he had. There were people in similar cabins about four or five hours’ walk in two different directions, there to deter poachers or similar, and he would sometimes trudge off to see them – but there are any number of Russians passing by who pop in to drink vodka and make crude jokes. At one point there’s even an American tourist. I felt sometimes like I am more alone in my flat than Tesson was in his cabin.

There are beautiful descriptions of unabashed wilderness in this book, and some people would find his account very interesting. I’ll admit that I did find it a bit hard to warm to the book. I think of similar ventures like Nell Stevens’ in Bleaker House (on Bleaker in the Falkland Islands) which I absolutely loved – and I think that was because she was freer with her foibles, more willing to reveal her practical and emotional struggles. Tesson leans more into philosophy. He is – how else to say it? – very French.

Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.

I was quite happy to keep reading Consolations of the Forest through to the end, but some slight spark was missing in it for me. Interesting, but not quite up my street.

When in French (2016) by Lauren Collins

Speaking of French – here’s a book I started ages ago, and somehow forgot to continue, all about French. Specifically, it is about Lauren’s experience being married to a Frenchman, Olivier. They met in England (she is American), and moved to Geneva, a French-speaking part of Switzerland. It is essentially asks the question: what is it like to love across a language barrier?

I was nervous, the usual anxieties a person has about whether or not her boyfriend’s family will like her overlaid with uncertainty as to whether, in the fog of language, they’d even be able to make out the right person to like or not.

In amidst that question is a huge amount of other research – are people different in their second languages? Can you be your true self when you are learning a language? Can goats have regional accents? (Yes, it turns out.) It’s an ambitious amount to cover in a book that is also a more straightforward memoir of living abroad, struggling to acclimatise, losing some of yourself, finding triumphs and humour in the everyday.

We spoke to each other in endearments. My darling, my love, mon amour, ma chérie, poussin, mouton, bébé. This was new to me, not characteristic. The word baby, applied to anyone over two, had always seemed like the adult diaper of endearments.

“Mon amour,” he’d say. “Pass me the salt?”

I’d yell across a store, trying to get his attention: “Bébé! Over here, in dairy products.”

People we knew, I think, made fun of us. What they didn’t know was that we couldn’t say each other’s names.

There are two very real people at the heart of the book, in Lauren and Olivier. Olivier is admittedly harder to read, and I’m not sure he comes across quite as Lauren sees him. As I’ve already mentioned this month, I love non-fiction where memoir and autobiography intermingle. I think I’d have preferred the balance in When in French to lean slightly more towards memoir, but that’s perhaps because the worlds of language and identity are so vast that you can only really scrape the surface on an objective level. The subjective is slightly easier to package.

I’d definitely recommend the book – and feel some personal triumph that my Duolingo French lessons have enabled me to translate most of the (easy) French she peppers into the story. It’s fun, thoughtful and honest.