Single, thirtysomething, working as a writer in New York City,
Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But she was
beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home.
When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed.
Kristin knew nothing about growing vegetables, let alone raising
pigs and cattle and driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if
not yet in love, she shed her city self and moved to five hundred
acres near Lake Champlain to start a new farm with
him. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of
their first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter
through the following harvest season-complete with their wedding in
the loft of the barn.
$15.00
"The Dirty Life is a delightful, tumultuous, and
tender story of the author's love affair with the man who becomes
her husband and the farm they work together to restore. With wisdom
and humor, Kristin Kimball describes how she abandoned her career
in New York City, leaving behind everything she thought was
important for a hard, distinctly unglamorous existence that turns
out to be the most fulfilling thing she's ever done." - Jeannette
Walls, author of Half Broke Horses
and The Glass Castle
"The Dirty Life is a wonderfully told tale of one of
the most interesting farms in the country. If you want to
understand the heart and soul of the new/old movement towards local
food, this is the book you need. It's the voice of what comes next
in this land, of the generation unleashed by Wendell Berry to do
something really grand." - Bill McKibben,
author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New
Planet
"In her beguiling memoir, Kimball describes the complex truth
about the simple life in prose that is observant and lyrical, yet
tempered by a farmer's lack of sentimentality." -
Elle Magazine
"Kimball is a graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail...
How lucky we are to be able to step into that world with no sweat.
I wished for a hundred pages more." - Minneapolis Star
Tribune
"As Kimball chronicles that first year in supple prose, the farm
takes on vivid form, with the frustrations balancing the
satisfactions and the dark complementing the light. Throughout the
book, the author ably describes the various trials and tribulations
involved... A hearty, chromatic account of a meaningful
accomplishment in farming." - Kirkus
Reviews
"Kimball writes in vivid but unsentimental language, equal parts
dirt and poetry." - Burlington Free Press