most of the people on this shelf had their winters named for them by history. katherine may named hers herself — and in doing so, gave the rest of us the word this whole feeling wears.
she's an english writer, born in 1977, living on the kent coast. and her story is not a gulag or a diagnosis given in months. it's deliberately ordinary, which is exactly why it's useful: it's the kind of winter that could be yours. around the time she turned forty, everything went at once. her husband's appendix became infected and burst while he was waiting for surgery — a genuine emergency, a hospital, a household suddenly upside down. she herself went through a long stretch of unexplained pain and months of testing before answers came. her son, about six, began refusing to go to school — and rather than force him through the gates each morning, she let him stay home, which upended everything else. and in the middle of it she resigned her university lecturing job. none of these alone is a catastrophe for the history books. together, in one year, they were a life quietly going under.
the idea
what she did with that year became wintering: the power of rest and retreat in difficult times (2020). the idea is almost embarrassingly simple, which is why it works. a winter, she says, is a fallow period that recurs in every life — a stretch where — in her framing — you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, cast as an outsider. everyone gets them. they are not rare, they are not shameful, and — this is the hinge — they are not a failure. they're a season. and seasons have jobs.
her model is the literal one, straight out the window: "plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer." the tree isn't failing in january. it's doing exactly what january requires — dropping what can't be sustained, going quiet at the surface, doing its repair work out of sight. the failure mode, in her account, is ours alone: trying to live a summer life in the middle of a winter, performing productivity and fine-ness while everything underneath is asking for rest.
so her prescription is the unfashionable one: slow down. sleep. retreat without apology. let the season be the season. she calls it the active acceptance of sadness — active, because it's a choice and a practice, not a collapse. and she notes, correctly, that in a culture like ours, "doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it is essential."
the tree isn't failing in january. trying to live a summer life in the middle of a winter — that's the only real failure mode, and it's optional.
why it landed
the book came out in late 2020 and became a bestseller around the world, because an entire planet was suddenly living an imposed, indefinite low season with no end date — though the book was written before the pandemic, out of her own private year. she's since written enchantment (2023), about wonder in an anxious age, and she has also written, in an earlier memoir, about receiving an autism diagnosis in her late thirties — her own account, mentioned here in one plain clause because she chose to publish it, and left there.
the honest ledger
she's living, and everything here comes from what she's published about herself. her period of pain is described as she described it — long, undiagnosed for months — with no condition named, because she hasn't pinned one publicly to that year. and wintering is an idea about seasons, not a treatment for anything; if your winter is heavier than rest can touch, a real person is the right next step.
for the long winter, her question is the gentlest on this shelf: what would it look like to stop pretending it's summer? one summer obligation dropped, one early night taken without apology. the season's already here. she'd say — winter it, on purpose.