Left only to her books and music in the midst of a Maine winter, she must look within herself for solace. The result of this reflection is a powerful meditation on the meaning of aging, writing, and one’s own company—and reaffirmation of the power of friends and companionship. In this graceful memoir, grumbach delicately balances the beauty of turning one’s back on everything with the hardship of complete aloneness.

Even as she attends church and collects her mail, she moves like a shadow, speaking to no one. 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.

A new york times notable book: to truly understand herself, Doris Grumbach embraces solitude With a busy career as a novelist, and bookstore owner, reviewer, essayist, Doris Grumbach has little opportunity to be alone.

The House by the Sea: A Journal

When may sarton uprooted her life after fifteen years in the refurbished New Hampshire house with the garden she tended so lovingly, she relied solely on instinct. The author and poet’s graceful elegy about life, love, and growing older: “The most moving and the most thoughtful of her journal-memoirs” The Plain Dealer, work, Cleveland.

But in her solitude—with its occasional interruptions for trips away and visits from friends—she realizes that creativity is constantly renewing itself. She creates a new garden and fears that in this tranquil state, she may never write again. And something told her it was time to move on. The house she chose by the sea in the Maine village of York is completely isolated except during the summer months.

Surrounded by nothing but endless ocean, and vast skies, woods, Sarton experiences a rare sense of peace. This journal offers fascinating insight into a remarkable woman and the work and friendships that form the twin pillars of her life. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton. Accompanied by her wild cat, and tamas, Bramble, a Shetland shepherd puppy—the first dog she ever owned—Sarton embarked on the next chapter of her life.

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Journal of a Solitude

Sarton’s garden is her great, abiding joy, sustaining her through seasons of psychic and emotional pain. Journal of a solitude is a moving and profound meditation on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude—both an exhilarating and terrifying state.

Both uplifting and cathartic, it sweeps us along on Sarton’s pilgrimage inward. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She likens writing to “cracking open the inner world again, ” which sometimes plunges her into depression.

The national bestseller: “sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her sixtieth, with remarkable candor and courage” Brain Pickings. Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self. May sarton may sarton’s parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her “real” life—not friends, not even love, but writing.

. She confesses her fears, her disappointments, her unresolved angers. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

60 Going on Fifty: The Baby Boomers' Memory Book

With their fiftieth high school reunion on the horizon, and here the guys tell stories about growing up in the ’40s, and ’60s, the “Columbus Crew” reconnected, ’50s, and how those times impacted who they are today—offering both a glimpse into history and a delightful ride down Memory Lane.

Old friends from the class of 1960 at an Indiana high school share nostalgic memories as their fiftieth reunion draws near . . . Let the columbus crew take you back to the days of flat tops, lassie, rock and roll—while sharing personal reminiscences of first cars, big bands, 20 cents per gallon gas, transistor radios, getting into trouble and finding their way out, LPs, the Hula Hoop, girlfriends, jobs, sports, and much more.

While the stories are unique to the columbus crew, they will rekindle memories for anyone who grew up in this glorious era—and for children and grandchildren of baby boomers, they show what life was like in mid-twentieth-century America. This is the story of sixteen classmates who graduated from Indiana’s Columbus High School in May, 1960

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At Eighty-Two: A Journal

She creates poetry out of everyday existence, whether bemoaning a lack of recognition by the literary establishment or the devastation wrought by a series of strokes. As she becomes more and more aware of “what holds life together in a workable whole, ” she takes solace in flowers and chocolate and reading letters from devoted fans.

In this poignant and fearless account, Sarton chronicles the struggles of life at eighty-two. Incapacitated by illness, Sarton relies on friends for the little things she always took for granted. The new york times–bestselling author of At Seventy returns with a memoir about advancing age, including her experience with a series of strokes.

This journal takes us into the heart and mind of an extraordinary artist and woman, and is a must-read for Sarton devotees and anyone facing the reality of growing older. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton. She juxtaposes the quotidian details of life—battling a leaky roof, devoted friends, sharing an afternoon nap with her cat, celebrity, the joy of buying a new mattress—with lyrical musings about work, and the limitations wrought by the frailties of age.

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At Seventy: A Journal

May sarton’s honest and engrossing journal of her seventieth year, spent living and working on the Maine coast May Sarton’s journals are a captivating look at a rich artistic life. At times mournful and at others hopeful, could proclaim, looking back on it all, this is a beautiful memoir of the year in which Sarton, “I am more myself than I have ever been.

”. Her reminiscences are raw, and her observations are infused with the poetic candor for which Sarton—over the course of her decades-long career—became known. In this, her ode to aging, caring for her dogs, she savors the daily pleasures of tending to her garden, and entertaining guests at her beloved Maine home by the sea.

An enlightening glimpse into a time—the early 1980s—and an age, At Seventy is at once specific and universal, providing a unique window into septuagenarian life that readers of all generations will enjoy.

A Country Year: Living the Questions

. . Once in a while there comes along a book so calm, so honest, so beautiful that even the most jaded or cynical readers have to say thank you. Describing the ups and downs of beekeeping from one springtime to the next, A Country Year transports readers to a different, simpler place. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world.

A “delightful, witty” memoir about starting over as a beekeeper in the Ozarks Library Journal. Alone on a small missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. . This is such a book” The San Diego Union-Tribune. In a series of exquisite vignettes, hubbell reveals the joys of a life attuned to nature in this heartfelt memoir about life on the land, and of a woman finding her way in middle age.

Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things she cared about.

Happy Days: My Mother, My Father, My Sister & Me

I had to do a lot of detective work to uncover the truth about my parents’ lives, ” Alexander said. They were a glamorous jazz age couple that moved in charmed circles with George and Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Parker, and Jerome Kern. I knew almost nothing about them as people. But by the end they really did become my best friends.

” . She shares insights about growing up with a cold, the suicide of her adopted daughter, her relationship with her younger sister, hypercritical mother, and her reconciliation with her parents after a twenty-year estrangement. This wise, unflinchingly candid memoir is also a revealing account of Alexander’s own life, witty, from her successful career as a writer and national-news commentator to her troubled marriages and emotionally wrenching love affairs.

Acclaimed 60 minutes commentator and true-crime author shana Alexander turns her journalist’s eye to her own unconventional family—and herself—in this fascinating, moving memoir Shana Alexander spent most of her life trying to figure out her enigmatic parents. Milton ager was a famous songwriter whose creations included “Ain’t She Sweet” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.

Cecelia ager was a film critic and Variety columnist. They remained together for fifty-seven years, and yet they lived separate lives.

A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting , Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books

A collection of sixty classic and contemporary essays, quotations, poems, lists, and cartoons that celebrates the joys of reading, stories, the feeling of spending hours browsing through a bookstore, and the people for whom buying books is a necessity. Booklovers will find themselves in good company within the pages of a passion for books, the tale of a book collector so obsessed with owning a book that he is willing to kill to possess it; and Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life, dealing with the question everyone with a sizable library is inevitably asked: "Have you read all these books?"; Gustave Flaubert's Bibliomania, beginning with science-fiction great Ray Bradbury's foreword and throughout contributions like-- Umberto Eco's How to Justify a Private Library, in which she shares her optimistic view on the role of reading and the future of books in the computer age.

Interspersed throughout are entertaining lists--ten bestselling books Rejected by Publishers Twenty Times or More, book clubs, Norman Mailer's Ten Favorite American Novels and many more-- plus select writings on bookstores, cartoons about books and a specially prepared "bibliobibliography" of books about books.

Whether you consider yourself a bibliomaniac or just someone who enjoys reading, A Passion for Books will provide you with a lifetime's worth of entertaining, informative, and pleasurable reading on your favorite subject--the love of books.

Dearest Dorothy, Are We There Yet? Welcome to Partonville Book 1

Before long, her gift for shaking things up may come in handy . . . This is the first in the delightful small-town series starring “the plucky 80-something grandma who’s a demon at the wheel” Publishers Weekly. If you enjoyed jan karon’s mitford series, I think you’ll love the Dearest Dorothy series” Christian Fiction Reviewer.

On the outskirts of the pastoral illinois town of partonville, or grab a stool at harry’s counter, venturing out to drive around in her 1976 Lincoln Continental—affectionately dubbed “The Tank”—play bunco with her pals, Illinois, eighty-seven-year-old Dorothy Wetstra lives on her farm, where she can stay on top of the town’s latest shenanigans most of which she is responsible for.

But when a visitor comes to town with a proposition, Dorothy finds herself faced with a decision that could change her beloved town, and her life.

Old Friends

Seventy-two-year-old joe was chief probation officer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, holds a law degree, and has faced the death of a son and the raising of a mentally challenged daughter. A pulitzer prize–winning author’s “touching, funny and inspiring” true story of daily life in a New England nursing home The New York Times.

As in his pulitzer prize-winning the soul of a new machine, kidder reveals his extraordinary talent as a storyteller by taking the potentially unpalatable subject of life in a nursing home and making it into a highly readable, House, and the best-selling Among Schoolchildren, engrossing account. Library journal “rich detail and true-to-the-ear dialogue let the brave and determined elderly speak for themselves—and for the continually surprising potential of the human spirit.

Kirkus Reviews. Focusing on these two men as well as introducing us to the other aging residents of Linda Manor in Northampton, Massachusetts, literary journalist Tracy Kidder examines the sorrows and joys of growing older and the universal struggle to find meaning in the face of mortality. From the new york times–bestselling author and National Book Award–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine, this is an extraordinary look inside an often-hidden world.

Despite coming from very different backgrounds, the two become close friends. Now, the two men are roommates in a nursing home. Ninety-year-old lou quit school after the eighth grade, worked for the rest of his life, and stayed with the same woman for nearly seventy years.