Three memoirs about isolation, aging, and death from an author whose "private self is as intelligent and generous as her public persona" ( Publishers Weekly).Fifty Days of Solitude: Faced with a rare opportunity to experiment with true solitude, Doris Grumbach decided to live in her coastal Maine home without speaking to anyone for fifty days. A New York Times Notable Book, the result is a "quiet, elegantly written" recollection about what it means...

A New York Times Notable Book: To truly understand herself, Doris Grumbach embraces solitudeWith a busy career as a novelist, essayist, reviewer, and bookstore owner, Doris Grumbach has little opportunity to be alone. However, after seventy-five years on the planet, she finally has her chance: Her partner has departed for an extended book-buying trip, and Grumbach has been given fifty days to relax, think, and write about her experience.In this graceful memo...

A New York Times Notable Book: One woman's search for the value of a long lifeWith the advent of her seventieth birthday, many changes have beset Doris Grumbach: the rapidly accelerating speed of the world around her, the premature deaths of her younger friends, her own increasing infirmities, and her move from cosmopolitan Washington, DC, to the calm of the Maine coast. Coming into the End Zone is an account of everything Grumbach observes over the course ...

The story of an ecstatic spiritual moment—and the search to experience it againWhen she was twenty-seven years old, writer Doris Grumbach had an epiphany. It was as if God were right there beside her, and she had a "feeling of peace so intense that it seemed to expand into ineffable joy." After this fleeting moment, Grumbach became determined to recapture what she had felt. The Presence of Absence is the story of her fifty-year search.Grumbach is an...

A literary master looks ahead to her eightiesAs her eightieth birthday approaches, Doris Grumbach does not feel melancholy or saddened by the upcoming event, despite the loss of friends such as Kay Boyle and Dorothy Day—instead she takes it as an opportunity both to look backward and to grow. In this, her summer of unexpected content, Grumbach weaves the elegiac and the practical into a delightful tapestry of experience.She looks deep into her own history, t...

A tender and imaginative retelling of the adventures of two of history's most compelling womenIn 1778 Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby left County Kilkenny for Wales to live together as a married couple. Both well born, highly educated Irish women, the Ladies of Llangollen, as they came to be known, defied all eighteenth-century social convention and spent half a century together in a loving relationship.Removed from the intrusive gaze of the world, the fict...

Two compelling works of fiction from a feminist literary icon hailed as "Virginia Woolf without the evasive prettifying" ( The New York Times).Chamber Music: Caroline Maclaren, the widow of a prominent composer, is finally going to tell her own life story. Taking pen to paper, she relives her sheltered youth, her chilly marriage to a brilliant man, and the melancholy solitude she experienced until she found loving companionship with her ill husban...

A look into the daily life of one of America's great memoiristsAt seventy-seven Doris Grumbach is as sharp as ever, and in Life in a Day she examines the experiences of her later years, from the dreaded writer's block to the many hours she has spent reading to the effects of an increasingly modern and interconnected world. Imbued with Grumbach's characteristic candor and verve, Life in a Day is a celebration of the meaning to be found in the quotid...

Three brilliant works of fiction from a feminist and lesbian literary icon who was "acutely sensitive to the quiet hum of everyday living" ( Ms.).The Missing Person: Legendary movie star Franny Fuller captured the imaginations of audiences, men, and her biographer, Mary Maguire. But what does the glamour hide? This is the story of how a girl from Utica, New York, transformed into a Hollywood sensation—and the secret she had to keep if she wanted to...

A New York Times Notable Book: A moving glimpse of a life shrewdly examinedExtra Innings follows a year in the life of Doris Grumbach, beginning with the release of her previous memoir and journal, Coming into the End Zone, and revealing that the devoted essayist, novelist, and critic possesses as keen an eye in her seventies as she did when she wrote The Spoil of Flowers thirty years earlier .Grumbach details each passing...

Doris Grumbach's chilling look at the ways childhood experiences create transformative echoes that last throughout adulthood"I want to lead you all into the ocean to see if you will drown."During the summer of 1929 four children come together and change the course of their lives forever. Caleb and Kate Flowers live an isolated existence with their mother until Lionel Schwartz and Roslyn Hellman come to Far Rockaway for the summer. Roslyn, quickly s...

In her later years, a woman reflects on her marriage, her stifled passions, and her lifeAt age ninety, Caroline Maclaren, widow of the prominent composer Robert Maclaren, finally decides to tell her own story. "Perhaps the time was not right to do it before," she remarks. But now she takes pen to paper, reliving her sheltered girlhood, her chilly marriage to a brilliant man, and—perhaps above all—the melancholy solitude in which she has lived nearly all her life. It...