“The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society”

[Spoiler alert: details, including the ending, of the film “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” are mentioned quite explicitly.]

In the past week, I have been binge-watching the film “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”. 

I sometimes do this, with songs as well as with movies: I go through phases of days, weeks, sometimes even months, when I play the song or movie over and over because it somehow appeals to, reaches, and touches something profound and/or particularly sensitive in me at that particular moment. 

I discovered the film The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society during the height of the pandemic and back then it appealed to me, spoke to me, mainly because of the topics of isolation, threat, and human connection (with the happy ending after hardships). 

This morning I’ve been wondering why this movie is appealing to me and speaking to me so much now and I think it’s for several reasons. Probably I’m still — or again — resonating with the topics of isolation and human connection and happy ending after hardships as I finally come back to life after a hard, and quite isolated, winter (first with my second round of COVID in November 2022 and then with all the pre/post-op preparations & recovery). But there’s also other levels or elements speaking to my heart even more strongly now. 

There’s the element of living — and surviving — with the enemy, in a hostile environment: the Guernsey islanders with the German occupants during WWII; me with my hostile, controlling, passive-aggressive housemate (who’s recently been acting up). 

There’s the theme of personal liberation even going against expectations as the leading female character makes her own path, finds her own way, following her heart, breaking a stifling engagement, stating her independence. And also, the related theme of the importance of getting support from the right people in finding our path or in finding the courage to actually walk our way. 

Another important element is also that of the “chosen family” or “village”: so much of the story in this movie is about not being able to have or connect to or be loved by one’s biological family but finding support and connection and love within a group of people who are a chosen family, a tribe in which persons support and love one another profoundly and without stifling each other. A theme that is extremely dear to me and similar to what I have experienced in most of my life. 

And finally, there’s the topic of the “impossible love”, of the profound, instinctive, almost immediate but also unexpected connection and understanding and attraction between two people who seem so different and yet share so much deep inside them. Something I’ve experienced, too, more than once: for me those connections, those moments, were lovely and beautiful and wonderful, even joyful, but also painful sometimes because many of them didn’t last as much as I would have liked them to or didn’t develop as fully as I would have hoped. In the film The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, instead, the seemingly “impossible love” — the profound, instinctive, almost immediate but also unexpected connection and attraction between the writer and the pig-farmer — ends happily, somehow giving me some vicarious catharsis, I guess.