LIFE IN A DAY - Hardcover

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.

Doris Grumbach is author of Coming into the End Zone, Extra Innings, and Fifty Days of Solitude, among other books. She has also been a contributing editor to The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review, and a book reviewer for National Public Radio. She lives in Maine.