“Candy is about happiness in the moment—this exact moment, each subdivided microsecond of melt, each deliriously destructive chomp,” writes Sarah Perry in Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover. Her wonderful, near-encyclopedic ode to confectionery sweets is a collection of microessays, organized by candy color and accompanied by line drawings, including everything from Pop Rocks and Pixy Stix to wax lips and Lindt truffles. It’s quite the contrast to her first book, After the Eclipse, about her 30-year-old mother’s murder by a stranger in their home when Perry was 12. “I was so tired of darkness,” Perry writes. “Maybe my next book, I told my friends, should be about kittens and rainbows. I didn’t know how accurate that joke would prove to be.”
A supremely serious connoisseur, Perry notes, “For some, it’s sports, yoga, gardening, or sex; for me it’s candy—and sex, though not at the same time.” Indeed, her writing can be sensual, as in her description of an Aero bar: “Hold a section in your mouth and feel it break down, chamber by chamber, your saliva flooding it like the compartments of the Titanic.” She’s often humorous, noting, for instance, her love of Vitafusion melatonin gummies: “I’m candy dependent even when unconscious.” Interesting history emerges as well, such as the fact that candy bars were first popularized “as a ‘nourishing lunch’ for hungry men and rations for exhausted soldiers in World War I.”
What’s perhaps most fun are Perry’s strong opinions. She calls cotton candy “an edible cloud, the purest possible form of sugar, a miracle of physics, and still, I hate it.” Of Necco wafers, she confesses, “I just cannot believe that anybody truly likes these. Like refined Tums.” And Junior Mints are “the most candy of the mints, total perfection all around.”
This is much more than a book about sweets, however. Perry uses the subject to delve into many aspects of pop culture, politics, emotion and her past and present life, including her polyamorous relationships. Throughout, she draws sharp, poignant connections between her musings about candy, and memories and loss of her mother: “There’s a satisfaction in learning the real meaning behind any childhood moment, even if that meaning is sad or scary. It takes these floating, isolated memories and pins them to the fabric of your life story, allowing you to better retain them within a greater context.”
Dip in and out of these essays as you would your favorite treat. Sweet but never saccharine, Sweet Nothings is a book worth savoring.
