YEAR OF PLENTY
A Family's Season of Grief
In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.” So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives.
In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.” So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives. How can we make the most of our time, they wonder, when time feels so short?
Written in vignettes and accompanied by photographs and family interviews, Year of Plenty provides a poignant and unflinching account of how death separates us not only from the people we love but from places and memories too. Hollars explores how death’s all-consuming weight has the potential to fracture—rather than strengthen—even those relationships we think we know the best. Ultimately, he cracks wide personal moments from his own life and allows the world to peer in.
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Paperback
- May 2024
- 272 Pages
- 9780299347444
Buy the Book
$24.95
About B.J. Hollars
B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently Wisconsin for Kennedy: The Primary That Launched a President and Changed The Course of History, Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief. He’s the recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Nonfiction, the Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize, the Council of Wisconsin Writers’ Blei-Derleth Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and received a 2022 silver medal from the Midwest Book Awards.
Praise
“The most beautiful series of intimate and honest vignettes of regular life that I have ever read.” —Fort Wayne Magazine
“Fascinating, informative, candid, insightful, deeply personal and ultimately inspiring…” —Midwest Book Review
“Hollars helps show us how it’s possible to stay present, how to notice, even—or especially—when we’re in the thick of it. I fell in love with this whole beautiful family—and then I took some of that cracked-open-heart tenderness back to my own dear ones.” —Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays
Discussion Questions
1. In Year of Plenty, author B.J. Hollars explores his struggle to understand his role in supporting his wife and their family amid the loss of his father-in-law. How does one’s positioning in relationship to the lost loved one impact one’s behavior? Can we ever understand the experiences of others through experiences we haven’t faced ourselves?
2. The epigraph for Year of Plenty comes from poet Amy Fleury, who writes, “What would we make of a life both blighted and blessed? / There was trouble all around and everywhere little mercies.” Have you observed this sentiment in your own life? How does the richness of life’s vast experiences leave space for both the “blight” and the “blessing”? How does one work alongside the other?
3. Much of Year of Plenty explores the intersection between the natural world and our interiors. In what ways might nature provide a deeper understanding or entry point into our emotional lives? How does the continuity of the natural world speak to our survival?
4. Beyond the narrative, Year of Plenty also showcases family photographs and transcripts of interviews with the author’s wife and children. How do these features impact you as a reader?
5. While much of the book is organized around chronological vignettes, Hollars also integrates the occasional brief flashbacks to provide scenic details of his relationship with his wife. These scenes take on many forms—a first meeting at a summer camp, a trip to New Mexico, and coping with the death of a family dog, to name a few. Did you notice any changes in their relationship over time? What do you think prompts an evolution in long-term relationships? What role might grief play?
6. Year of Plenty explores the theme of continuity. Not exactly the notion that “life goes on” but the realization that “life goes on differently.” Considering your losses, how has your life gone on differently?
7. Often, grief strikes when we least expect it. Can you think of a moment when grief unexpectedly took hold of you? Has your grief evolved?