Books: "Sweet Nothings" By Sarah Perry

 

Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover

By Sarah Perry

Mariner Books; hardcover, 304 pages; $29.99

Sarah Perry is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse, which was honored as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She is a recipient of the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, and was nominated for the 2024 MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation.

Sweet Nothings is Perry's newest book catalogs the simple and not-so-simple pleasures of the eclectic world of candy. This taxonomy of sweetness, a rhapsody of artificial flavors, and a multi-faceted theory of pleasure presented in 100 micro-essays, with illustrations by Forsyth Harmon, that are organized by candy color, form the red of Pop Rocks to the green of Andes mints to the purple Jelly Bonbon found in the Whitman's Sampler.

Each entry meditates on taste and texture, with memories unlocked along the way. She covers everything from Snickers to Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Cups, as well as Werther's Originals. She asks such pressing questions as, Twizzlers or Red Vines? Why are Mentos eaters so maniacally happy? In responde to the dreaded "What is your favorite candy?" question, she counters with, "Under what circumstances? In what weather? In what mood?"

To Perry, candy is linked to the seasons of our lives, and this book moves associatively, as she touches on pop culture, art, culinary history, philosophy, body image, and class-based food moralism. She also challenges the idea of "junk food," while positing about taking pleasure seriously as a means of survival.

The thing that comes through is how much Perry loves candy, which she uses to weave together lamenting glimpses into her childhood in the '90s, and the loss at the center of it, with stories of love and desire, making for a smart and funny read that will continue to cement her as a writer with impact.

In this excerpt, Perry examines the ubiquitous candy shaped like root beer barrels: Just an elegant idea, these - an intensely sugary soda in nugget form. The shape of this ancient penny candy is so old-fashioned I wonder if it makes any sense to kids these days, when and if they encounter it. Even in the 1980s, barrels abounded in my childhood, on-screen and in person: they carried cartoon characters over waterfalls, and they stood in the rock shop near my home in Maine, filled with tiny polished stones that my mother and I dipped our arms into, the cool, smooth surfaces flowing over our skin. Barrels decorated restaurants in the mountains of New Hampshire, where my aunt Gwen lived, where everything rustic had a clean, burnished charm. Barrel planters bordered yards, standing vertical or artfully tipped over, spilling pansies and marigolds onto bright lawns surrounded by tall pines.

I would get my root beer barrels from the penny candy counter at our tiny Main Street pharmacy, which tells you what a time capsule Maine is, its people forever looking backward, visiting drive-ins and roadside ice cream stands, using all manner of odd language to help and confuse those "from away."(Ask directions of a Mainer - and you will have to, because cell reception is abysmal up there - and those directions will include at least one landmark that hasn't stood there for a decade, or the name of a family farm now paved over with a Dollar General.) Those sugar barrels were admirably detailed: little incised lines for the planks, two raised rings for the stays. Wait, that's not right: the wooden boards are called staves, the metal rings that hold them together are hoops. I used to have this knowledge: staves, hoops, bilge - it comes back to me, and I wonder how much other forgotten knowledge I contain. As kids we'd giggle at "bunghole," even before Beavis and Butt-Head. Those were days of analog knowledge, when the thought of wood entered the daily conversation, when at least some of the materials of your life would be recognizable to your ancestors. Before everything became plastic, acrylic, ahistorical.

So this candy was an ancient shape, echoing an object that stood in distilleries and barns and in the holds of ships made form the same wood and iron, and the flavor, too, was old, a treat crafted for your great-grandparents. The base for root beer is sarsaparilla, or sassafras, long known to the region's Native American peoples as medicine, commodified by white pharmacists in the mid-nineteenth century, enhanced with various herbs and spices. Birch, spruce, wintergreen: a forest on the tongue. the depth of old-growth trees entering your body, ushered in by sugar. Star anise, nutmeg, clove, ginger: spices that had once been precious, once meant wealth. Molasses: currency and history, the South and its violence, the North and its violence.