Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir - Hardcover

Grumbach, Doris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393030091 ISBN 13: 9780393030099

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1991

Synopsis

The novelist's journal, written as a celebration of her seventieth year, relates the milestones, mishaps, losses, friendships, and decisions that shaped her life

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Novelist/critic Grumbach (The Magician's Girl, 1987, etc.) confronts age and mortality in this rambling, if elegantly phrased, journal of the year following her 70th birthday. Stating at the outset that she is ``taking notes, hoping to find in the recording process a positive value to living so long,'' Grumbach proceeds with a month-by-month chronicle of a year in which, expecting little (``I'd be surprised if anything of interest happens...''), she instead experiences and learns quite a bit. Despite what seems to be an extremely busy life--writing fiction, reviewing books for National Public Radio, assisting her companion in their bookstore, traveling (to Mexico, Paris, Maine, New York, Boston, and Key West)--Grumbach feels haunted by death--in the daily reminders of her own diminished vitality and, more tragically, in the AIDS-related losses of several younger friends. And so, ``taking stock,'' she sorts through her life, recalling significant people, places, and events as they come to mind. She finds time to exult, writing lovingly about the Maya, the sea, finely printed books, writing, family and friends. More often, though, she grumbles--about ``shoddy'' new books, crowds in movie theaters, ``speed...fast cars, planes, rapid talkers, swift up and down escalators, athletes, the computer's cursor,'' overly familiar attendants in doctors' offices. Throughout, the author's vigorous activities and opinions contrast oddly with her sense that ``it is too late,'' the final turnabout being her move from an established life in Washington, D.C., to face a ``chaotic'' future in rural Maine. Regrettably, the shapeless journal form allows neither writer nor reader a chance to savor the unfolding ironies. Enmeshed in her ``new era of self-indulgence,'' Grumbach has fashioned only what seems to be rough fodder for a full-scale autobiography, a novel, or perhaps a collection of essays. As is, we get jottings, we get pronouncements, we get bored. Interesting content, badly in need of form. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

This elegant and thoughtful memoir, written during the author's 70th year, records her reactions and thoughts on growing older and also journeys into particularly vivid memories. It also records her daily existence, with all its joys, fears, and quotidian chores. One of the more remarkable things about the book is that it chronicles a major change in the author's life, that of the move from Washington, D.C., with all its urban intensity, to the quiet coast of Maine. The author's anxieties and hopes about this decision are recorded in clear, straightforward prose. Although the tone of this book sometimes verges on the cranky, or even bitter, it is saved from that indulgence by the honesty of the writing and the keen self-conscious tone of a writer who is her own most severe critic.
- Jessica Grim, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0393030091
• ISBN 13: 9780393030099
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256