When I read Grumbach’s book in July of 2013, the last line of my review read “A book to be returned to!”, and return to it I have done.  I was motivated to do so by May Sarton’s book which I read last month which was a rather dour view of solitude and seemed to conflate that state of being with loneliness.

Grumbach, on the other hand, was a 74 year old author who embraced the opportunity to have 50 days alone at her Sargentville, Maine home when Sybil, her partner of many years had gone off to the city to buy books for her bookstore.  In this the fourth of her six memoirs, all written after she turned 70, Grumbach, who had been the literary critic for the New Republic and a contributor to the NYT, The New Yorker, and NPR tells how she looked forward to thinking, writing, observing, and connecting with her inner world (‘that frighteningly reflexive pronoun, myself”) where she discovers the ‘significance of the inconsequential’.

I loved this book when I first read it partly because it described one of my own long term fantasies—-marooned for a long period of time in wintry, snow-bound Vermont with books, a wood stove, and hours to myself to just do whatever I wanted.  The other reason this book resonated with me was the strange and mysterious ways in which Grumbach’s path seemed to cross mine.  In one of her many asides in which she comments upon a friend’s death, she talks of David Vareano, a painter whose work hangs in your home in Cambridge.  Another artist she mentions is Donald Furst whose print, “Into Winter I” graces the cover of the book.  Grumbach and he crossed paths when they were both in Iowa, she teaching at the Writer’s Workshop.  She describes how ‘the top seventh of the rectangular page is filled with winter trees and snow-covered fields. The rest of the long sheet is white, untouched by any lines or colors, so that most of the work is blank, leaving a great deal of space for the snow to lie heavy and impenetrable on the ground.”  One of Furst’s prints hangs on a Cambridge wall, as well.

It is impossible to include all of the quotes or list all of the points at which my experience in Vermont, reading and being alone intersects with hers, but suffice it to say that this was a special experience of sharing and melding with a writer’s words and thoughts.  Grumbach brings a realistic though often harsh view of aging to the page, but it’s one that also holds love of the natural world, a dear set of recollections of people and places, and a determination to move forward with love (Sybil), place (Maine), and reading.

Grumbach and her partner left their beloved coast of Maine and Sybil’s bookstore and moved to Pennsylvania to be near to one of Grumbach’s four daughters in 2005 when she was 87 years old.  Sybil died in 2021 and Grumbach the following year.  She was 104.