Radiance of the Ordinary

BY TARA COUTURE | CHELSEA GREEN, 2025. 224 pp., $28.00

Reviewed by Andrew Simon

“Farmer, mother to three beautiful daughters, nutritionist, and a hopelessly devoted woman to my man. I hang out with cows and ravens, beavers and snakes whenever they’ll have me. I’m after the real, in all of its messy glory, or nothing at all.” This is Tara Couture’s description of herself on her Substack page. “I’m a storyteller,” she says in the introduction to her website, The Slowdown Farmstead. “Life is agonizing and beautiful and wicked and wondrous,” she goes on. “There is no hiding from the pain unless you’re willing to dilute the joy.”

I came to love, enjoy, and deeply respect Couture’s book, Radiance of the Ordinary, but not without a struggle. I loved the vivid descriptions of her personal journey from childhood traumas to the rich, hard-won satisfaction of life on her Ontario farm. I respect, above all, her honesty as she talks about confronting her own early fears about death and, later, the death of her beloved daughter. I had to wrestle, throughout the book, with the alarm bells that rang for me whenever Couture discusses God, vaccinations, and feminism. This book is well worth any struggles.

In her storytelling mode, Couture regales the reader with tales from her childhood on the Canadian prairie. I won’t forget the moment when her uncle’s wheat combine almost shredded her. Or the buffalo “harvest” with her friend and mentor Richard, where, as someone who had always run from death, Tara was eyes open, hand on the animal as it died. “[The bison] wasn’t in her body anymore. A body left behind to nourish us, as the life that had been moved on…She left, in her wake, utter, untouchable peace.” Richard plays a key role in Couture’s evolution, modeling a deep understanding of the land, teaching Tara everything from slaughtering farm animals —precise and efficient butchering —to the importance of love between a farmer and her dairy cows. 

Radiance of the Ordinary is a collection of short to medium-length essays and is divided into three parts: Harvest, Home, and Evermore. The reader gets to know Tara, her origins, her family, and her farm. She tells funny and moving stories about her close relationships with cows, steers, ducks, pigs, and butterflies. She describes, in elegant prose, her learning process over the years and her deep love for the work that the land demands and the products that it yields. She revels in simply sitting in her root cellar, gazing at the stored vegetables and jars of preserves she has made from the farm’s bounty. 

The epicenter of the third part (“Evermore”) is the death of her youngest daughter, Mila, who took her own life at 18. This event reverberates throughout the book. Tara and her husband Troy face this tragedy with a powerful combination of private rituals, unbridled grief, and, gradually, a reconnection with the land and its creatures. She does not flinch from telling us this painful story. The central (and longest) essay is titled simply “The Death of Our Daughter.” Couture’s honest accounts of this event, its causes, and its personal consequences are extraordinary. Death is an essential part of farming and an inescapable part of all life. Couture acknowledges this fact and explores it fully. The last essay in the book is a short one: “When I Die.”

As I said, my passage through the book was not without grumbling. Too many rapturous mentions of God for me. The explanations of why she and her family avoid vaccines troubled me. The descriptions of her husband as “[my] king, my king, until my last breath, my king” rattled my feminist values. Sometimes, I just found myself thinking: too many words, Tara! However, I recommend this book enthusiastically as a beautiful, frank account of farm life from a skilled writer who loves farming and loves life. Read it over the winter, sitting by the woodstove. You won’t regret it.