Doris Grumbach

A New York Times Notable Book Faced with a rare opportunity to experiment with solitude, Doris Grumbach decided to live in her coastal Maine home without speaking to anyone for fifty days. The result is a beautiful meditation about what it means to write, to be alone, and to come to terms with mortality.

Using the occasion of her eightieth-birthday party to reflect on the past, Grumbach delivers an enchanting memoir of the writers, friends, and loves who have accompanied her in mind and body through an extraordinary life of letters." "Through her eyes we enter the rich literary world of the twentieth century. From her days as a proofreader at Mademoiselle in the 1940s, Grumbach recalls a parade of celebrities - from Gypsy Rose Lee to Carson McCullers. She relives a shocking encounter with Bertrand Russell, explains the meaning of the recent loss of May Sarton, and names a new cat after her acquaintance and Washington journalist Kitty Kelley." "With guides such as Malcolm Cowley, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Merton, and Virginia Woolf, Grumbach's reveling in the company of writers and friends shows us what it means to keep the living and the dead in our lives.

"Astonishes in its honesty. . . . What greater gift can a memoir bring than a self revealed in all its grubby particulars?" -Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, "The Washington Post Book World" "A diary of a day that encapsulates the memories, reflections, and yearnings of a lifetime as gracefully as a Faberge egg captures spring sunlight in its tiny interior." -"Kirkus Reviews" "For Grumbach, living is an adventure on the magic carpet ride of memory, reverie, and imagination. "Life in a Day" affirms the ripples of meaning which can emanate out of simple rituals, happenings, and activities."-Frederic A. Brussat, "Body Mind Spirit" " "Life in a Day"] illuminates the way memory has woven itself into the fabric of a rich life. . . . To spend a day with Grumbach] is rewarding." -Patricia Roth Schwartz, "Lambda Book Report" " A] wise and lovely little book." -Barbara Holliday, "Detroit Free Press" "This is a profoundly optimistic book: a validation of the strength and the tranquility to be found within the confines of the human mind." -"Publishers Weekly," starred review

It records an eventful and quotidian year crowded with literary pleasures and pains, the natural beauties and social particulars of life in coastal Maine, the mingled joys and affronts of travel to New York, Washington, Mexico, and the looming presence of illness and mortality. It is, finally, a book about the successful search for home and for inward peace.

The Magician's Girl tells the story of three New York women who meet at Barnard in the late 1930s and fulfill their separate destinies from the 1940s to 1978. Lyrical, dramatic, and wise, Grumbach's novel is rich with evocations of America's past, from the flavors of New York City to academic life in the 1970s.

The Ladies is a touching, imaginative retelling of the story of two of history's most interesting characters: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, well-born Irish women who defied all conventions of their eighteenth-century Irish homeland and eloped to the small hamlet of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived as a married couple. There, removed from the eyes of the world, they hoped to live out their quiet lives. But the world outside gradually came to claim the Ladies--first out of curiosity, but eventually on the basis of profound respect, and even love. Visited by such luminaries as Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Horace Walpole, among many others, Eleanor and Sarah became known throughout Britain and to history as the "Ladies of Llangollen."

The Missing Person is a daring work that tells the story of Franny Fuller, the sexy, voluptuous movie star whose glorious blonde mane and whispery voice have aroused the fascination of every gossip columnist and moviegoer in the country. But beneath her radiant, compelling image lives still the frightened little girl from upstate New York. Define only by the way the studios, the flacks, her husbands and lovers, and the public perceive her, Franny Fuller is a "missing person," no more tangible than the image projected of her on a thousand silver screens. Framing her portrait of Franny Fuller within a persuasive and moving story, Doris Grumbach has created a haunting work that probes the private misery behind public glamour.