Life in a Day

In this elegant meditation on age and memory, Grumbach's grace, humor, and insight alert us to the transience of each day and the constant play between past and present.

"[A] book that astonishes in its honesty. . . . What greater gift can a memoir bring than a self revealed in all its grubby particulars, with wit and, when day is done, acceptance?"
-Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, The Washington Post Book Review

With the recent plethora of memoirs delving into traumatic lives and despairing experiences, this quiet memoir from the author of The Book of Knowledge and Fifty Days of Solitude is charmingly refreshing. We follow the 77-year-old novelist through a day, eavesdropping on her daily fussings and the interior conversations she conducts with the muses that enable her to write, including Dylan Thomas, Somerset Maugham, and her friend, the late May Sarton. With digressive sidetrips inspired by whatever distracts Grumbach from her quiet daily processes, we enter a rich world of memory and thought informed by a lifetime of books and letters. Sorry, no teenage traumas or bouts with alchoholism or bulimia here--just a fine artist at the top of her craft.