They helped sustain her own sense of self worth and gave her hope in human resilience. Her adolescent pangs, complicated by the difficult parent-child relationship and a family whose cycles of abuse and neglect went back generations, were counterbalanced by her attentive grandpa and the delight she took in the bees and their hives. She and her younger brother virtually raised themselves with the assistance of grandparents who displayed eccentricities of their own. A former San Francisco Chronicle reporter and fifth-generation beekeeper, May, describes her family’s toxic history with surprising candor and vivid, often gorgeous prose.įollowing her parents’ abrupt separation and a swift move from Rhode Island to California, May watched helplessly as her mother receded into neurosis, depression and seclusion. May’s new memoir, “The Honey Bus” (Park Row Books, $25, 336 pages) is an intricate, extraordinary story that draws parallels between the social realms of honeybees and human families. Honeybees, an unconventional grandfather and a 1951 military bus-turned-honey bottling factory were salvation for Carmel Valley writer Meredith May.
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