Rainbow Rowell:
(Nebraska, 24 February 1973).
American author of books for adults and young adults, including Eleanor & Park (2012), Fangirl (2013) and Carry On (2015).
October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!
It’s a love letter to autumn, written as a playful prayer. The language mixes the sacred with the cozy:
– “Baptize me with leaves” and “O grace!”:
Treat the season as something close to a religious experience. Beth is being washed clean and renewed by fall.
– “Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup”:
Turns autumn into a nurturing parent. It picks out fabrics and foods that mean comfort, warmth and being looked after.
– “Tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets”:
Refers to Halloween candy, and the childlike delight of finding small treats.
– “Carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins”:
Says her happiness is so big it spills into jack-o’-lanterns everywhere.
– “O autumn! O teakettle!”:
Sets a grand, poetic exclamation beside a humble kitchen object. That mix of the elevated and the domestic is the joke, and also the point:
The small cozy things are what feel holy.
Beth is also more lively and unguarded here than she is in much of the book, so the passage works as characterization as well as seasonal mood.
Origin:
The passage is an email from the character Beth Fremont to her friend Jennifer. Readers have marked it as one of Beth’s messages to Jennifer, about a third of the way into the book. The novel is set in 1999 at a newspaper office, where Beth and Jennifer chat by company email while a shy IT security officer, Lincoln, is paid to read flagged messages and slowly falls for Beth. Their emails are funny, warm and unfiltered, and this one is Beth at her most exuberant. (It later spread as a stand-alone “October quote,” and is often credited to Rowell alone without mentioning the book.)
Author: Rainbow Rowell, from her debut novel “Attachments” (2011).
