The leaving season A memoir in essays

A few years into their marriage, McMasters (Welcome to Shirley, 2015) and her artist husband bought a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, hours away from their home, work, and lives in New York City. It was a fixer-upper that was always falling apart. McMasters' husband was a skillful carpenter, but a health crisis, money problems, urban/rural culture shock, and just plain bad luck combined to keep the dream of a creative, bucolic escape for the couple just out of reach. When they moved there full time, and their two sons were born, the isolation and the difficulties became even more overwhelming. It's against this challenging background that McMasters shares a wise, honest, and completely absorbing memoir of marriage and motherhood that is particular in the details but universal in a way that will resonate with many readers. Resilience and reinvention are at the heart of it, as she struggles to support her family, raise her sons, and find community and, ultimately, peace.

A writer reflects on her decision to leave her marriage and her idyllic rural home. McMasters begins this poignant memoir in essays with an anecdote about how, when her children were young, she was obsessed with fire safety. She was so "focused on preventing fires inside the house" that she failed to notice that her family was falling victim to a "less spectacularly dramatic catastrophe": the dissolution of her marriage. In the next essay, "Intrepid," McMasters backtracks, relating her arrival in New York City in 1998 to work as a corporate legal assistant. Disillusioned by big law, she moved into editorial work and started dating a painter, referred to as R. In the wake of 9/11, she and R. moved in together and eventually married. Soon after, the couple bought a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, and their fish-out-of-water experiences there form the heart of the book. McMasters and her husband joined an unofficial barn bar run by a group of chain-smoking local farmers, unearthed a brood of rabbits living under their house, and reckoned with hunting season for the first time. If the author occasionally describes the surrounding community with anthropological detachment, she rhapsodically renders the experience of living at one with the natural world. Living in the farmhouse, McMasters felt "a kind of cellular belonging" she hadn't known since childhood, "as if the whole world belonged to me, every curving cattail, every sweet blossom of honeysuckle." Still, trouble in paradise emerged, and her husband's uncompromising devotion to his art, so alluring before, became problematic when McMasters gave birth to first one son and then another. Later, the couple opened a bookstore in a small neighboring town, a venture that was significant for the author in reclaiming her sense of self, even as it further exposed the fissures in her marriage. As meditation on motherhood, divorce, and creative work, the essays retread familiar territory, but the memoir is nevertheless appealing, told with candor and grace. A frank, introspective memoir of divorce, creativity, and the sacrifices of motherhood. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.