I recently moved from the hot, dusty Arizona desert to Seaport on Manhattan’s East River to take care of my adult daughter, who was awaiting a kidney transplant at nearby NYU Langone hospital. Our apartment looked out at a majestic tall ship, built of wrought iron in the 19th century for a Liverpool company and named Wavertree—a welcome reminder of Merseyside, where I was born and raised. Watching the boats sail by was a soothing distraction while we waited for news.
My husband had hoped to donate his kidney, but it proved to be incompatible with the now-failing one that our daughter received as a child 17 years ago. We were therefore introduced to the United States’s unique “Advanced Donation” scheme, whereby he donated to a stranger with a match, having surgery at 4am to allow the kidney to be flown cross-country to its recipient. In return, our daughter got a voucher (so American!) that bumped her up the list, giving a typical wait time of six months as opposed to several years.
We didn’t have to wait that long. Within a few weeks of her going on the list, we got a call saying that there had been a “chain break” in a planned set of paired kidney exchanges. It was a great match. All systems were go.
On arriving at the hospital, we could not help laughing when we were told that the kidney was stuck in traffic coming in from JFK. My feeble joke (“you’ve got to be kidneying me?”) raised a wry eyebrow from my serene daughter, who, two hours later, coolly walked herself into the operating theatre. Just three hours after that, the new kidney was plumbed in, and she was transferred to a room overlooking the river, with a glorious view of Brooklyn Bridge.
My preferred mode of transport to and from the hospital was ferry boat, listening to “Rhapsody in Blue”. I’ve always loved what Gershwin called his “musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness”, inspired by the “rattle-ty bang” of a train journey out of the city.
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My reward for caring for my husband and daughter was a solo trip upstate to a wellness retreat called Wildflower Farms near the blue-grey Catskill Mountains. Gywneth and Brad have just visited, my daughter informed me proudly, emphasising that I must take it seriously, and not mock! In the spirit of Gywnnie, I threw myself into meditation, forest immersion therapy and sourdough bread baking. I dutifully picked and artfully arranged papery blooms—Eucalyptus, Geraniums, Lisianthus, Native Goldenrod, dehydrated by the unseasonably hot weather and lack of rain. A field mouse woke me in the small hours, nibbling on the expensive avocado oil popcorn I’d snacked on the previous evening before ingesting a delicious salted caramel CBD chocolate.
Over breakfast—having picked my own farm eggs—I joked about my little early-morning visitor to the lovely waitress. “At least I wasn’t startled by a rattlesnake, as I was in the swimming pool on my first day in Arizona!” I said. “Oh, we have plenty of them here in the Hudson Valley,” she explained cheerfully. “We have the timber and massasauga rattlers, and I’ve spotted the odd northern copperhead. You don’t want to disturb one of those on your early morning meditation hike.”
I was back in the city for election day on 5th November. The weather was glorious, with the red-gold autumn leaves glowing in the morning light, and the sun playing on the river. I walked around the pier, watching the boats, and took a quick trawl around McNally Jackson, my favourite New York bookshop. Michelle Obama had recently made a surprise visit, and there was a buzz of energy among the perfectly curated bookshelves. I bought a copy of Sally Rooney’s (wretchedly unreadable and dull) Beautiful World, Where Are You? A better choice was a McNally reissue of the racy 1920s best seller Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. This mesmerising tale of a divorced woman in Manhattan in the Jazz Age is one of my best reads of the year. The prose so fresh and contemporary, and its heroine sexually liberated, daring and wickedly funny. Sex and the City long before its time.
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I stayed up as late as I could manage, believing—like everyone else—that it would be a tightly fought contest. In the morning, having received the news of Trump’s landslide victory, I took the dogs for a walk along the river to Battery Park to glimpse the Statue of Liberty. The streets were subdued. The usual cacophony of voices—the woman selling freshly sliced mango, the touts offering tickets for the Ellis Island tour—temporarily silenced. Manhattan felt like a ghost town. I reflected on the jubilant mood in the UK when Tony Blair won his own landslide election, the sense of excitement and renewal on the streets of Britain.
That evening, my editor in London sent me her suggestions for my new book, a historical novel about Jane Austen set in the Devonshire resort of Sidmouth. This gentle world must have been a welcome relief from the madness of her previous task: editing Boris Johnson’s memoir.
