There are moments in life that blindside us, rob us of context and take away our ability to put experience into words. These moments are made more terrifying precisely because we have no vocabulary for them – dazed, we can’t begin to understand, to take the moments apart and see how they work, comprehend why they’re hurting us so very much. Michelle Langstone’s debut coaxes these moments to pause and be captured, and more: beguiles them into speech.

Beginning with the loss of Langstone’s beloved father Dawson, Times Like These enters into a dance with the emotions surrounding loss. She gives her father a literary Viking funeral, crowding her memories of him onto the boats of her childhood holidays and lighting them into a glorious funeral pyre. Scenes of his failing health are contrasted with his swarthy vitality as the captain of their sea adventures.

Weekends and holidays see Langstone as both swallow and amazon, fishing and swimming through a salt-sprayed storybook fantasy childhood of rugged vigour, her heroic Pan-like father at the helm. Even her childhood near-drownings become glittering mermaid idylls which, if she hadn’t been so prosaically hauled from the depths, would have made coral of her bones, pearls of her eyes.

The practicalities and incremental tragedies of death are made newly poignant by the depth of Langstone’s perception. Readers who have experienced deep grief will be hit hard and early by moments that utterly destroy composure. Tip-top, Mouse. This is the life.

That’s not a warning to keep away. Langstone doesn’t drag us through the mire without offering us something valuable in return. In her willingness to enter into the vulnerability of sadness, the sordid and sublime details of approaching, then receding death, she finds communion with something bigger. Not something spiritual necessarily, but human: the swell of love underneath the little boats of daily life and family concerns, deeper than the sea. Langstone claims the sea does not love her but eventually grudgingly accepts her, which seems not dissimilar to her experiences of that deep ocean of love: her anchors come and go and the waves crash, treacherous and untrustworthy, but in she plunges.

The real triumph of Langstone’s book is that she’s made her father into a character. She’s drawn him tenderly into being, a figure we can experience and enjoy as much as any dandy rogue of the fictional sea. She’s given him a new life, not the same as the life he inhabited on earth, but a literary one. To have us feel her grief she has to let him be our father for a while, and he is, and we do.

More essays follow: honest and raw confrontations with infertility, that piecemeal soul grief that steals joy over and over; discussions of conflicted relationships with the physical body, of childhood bullying, of surrogate grandparents, of leaving notes in trees during the long walks of lockdown. Of seeking connections that are elusive, hostile or that disappear. Of her mother, a more tentative essay – it’s not easy to eulogise the living. There’s a melancholy about a life that from the outside appears largely blessed, which may make other readers, their own pain long hidden under veneers of resilience, feel seen. It would be lovely to see a companion volume soon, perhaps called In Happier Times, in which Langstone allows her readers to be trusted with a blissful dive into her moments of triumph and happiness in the same way she has trusted them so beautifully with her pain.

Reviewed by Ruth Spencer