When her companion Sylvia left for an extended book-buying trip, Doris Grumbach was given 50 days alone in their home on the coast of Maine. It was the winter of 1993 and the 75-year-old Grumbach surrounded herself with silence and music, with books and an empty journal, with paintings and the view out her window of a bare winter landscape. Fifty Days of Solitude is a memoir of what Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the "inscape": the deep, meandering landscape of an interior life. Grumbach's observations about the paintings of Edward Hopper, the death of a friend from AIDS, and the life-long grief of Dr. Anna Perkins for her companion Miss Hannay are full of dignity and pathos. Fifty Days of Solitude is a rendering of the mind and heart alone, of how distance and silence inform our compassion and intellect.


From Publishers Weekly
This quiet, elegantly written memoir by critic, novelist and essayist Grumbach ( Coming into the End Zone ) sensitively depicts the mingled pleasure and privation of turning one's back on the world. In the winter of 1993, with her companion away on a book-buying trip, the author decided "to attempt a trial return to the core of myself, staying absolutely alone" in their house in Sargentville, Maine. She shut off the phone and didn't watch television; although she went into town to collect her mail and attend church, Grumbach avoided speaking with the postmistress and fellow parishioners. Music and books were her only companions as she observed the natural world outside and wrestled with her own work indoors. It was a tranquil yet often somber experience: "My mail," she notes, "contained an inordinate amount of bad news," particularly about friends whose deaths prompted thoughts of her own mortality. In the book's most moving passages, she recalls a young dancer's slow demise from AIDS and the suicide of a writing student, the latter a chilling account of Grumbach's inability to help a tortured man who felt utterly alone. The author does not pretend to offer big revelations here, merely the intimate story of one woman's immersion in "the universal solitude in which we all have lived, try as we might to escape it." 20,000 first printing; author tour. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
After writing two astute and gruffly contemplative memoirs, Coming into the End Zone (1991) and Extra Innings , Grumbach has created a potently graceful meditation on the nature and value of solitude, especially for a writer. Weary of the clamor of the marketplace, leery of mind-numbing flattery, and impatient with "inconsequential conversation," Grumbach arranges to be alone for 50 winter days and nights. The television isn't working, the answering machine takes care of the phone, and Grumbach is ready to rediscover her "core." The absence of other voices amplifies her "inner one" and Grumbach finds herself steeped in memories of friends, especially those who have recently died. She also becomes much more aware of what she considers her vices and finds herself "looking hard at things," including sunrises and sunsets, reproductions of her favorite Edward Hopper paintings, and photographs of people who intrigue her. Honest and to the point, Grumbach calls our attention to an inspiring assortment of overlooked or neglected truths. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Graceful but essentially unsatisfying reflections on seven weeks spent alone in a house near the Maine coast. Novelist and critic Grumbach chronicled her move with her friend Sybil from Washington, D.C., to Maine in Extra Innings (1993), a memoir of her 74th year. A year later, Sybil hied herself back to Washington on an extended business trip--50 days, to be exact. Rather than accompany her, Grumbach decided to tough out a Maine winter alone, ``to move forward in my work and deeper into the chambered nautilus of the mind that produces it.'' Solitude is relative here. The author unplugged one phone but left another hooked to an answering machine, warning callers that she might or might not return calls. Recordings and radio broke the silence at home, trips to the post office and to church kept her in visual touch with other human beings, although she refrained from conversation. Nevertheless, long days passed when her only companions were birds, insects, books, and the two fictional characters who were the centerpiece of the novel she was working on. In this diary of her solitude, Grumbach ponders death (``...was I perhaps preparing myself for the final deep freeze...''), creativity, being alone, the search for self, and the consequences of silence--the cold seems colder, the space larger, and in the midst of a snowstorm, silence itself becomes noisy. Most rewarding are Grumbach's comments on books and authors; a lengthy reading list could be constructed from this small memoir. Vignettes of intriguing acquaintances are also deftly sketched. However, the brief journal-style entries, evocative as they often are, cry for further development. If Grumbach went to the bottom of her soul during her lonely winter, she does not take the reader with her. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
A New York Times Notable BookFaced 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.

ANNOTATION

Spending the first winter in her life that she is completely alone, Doris Grumbach begins a 50-day period of self-imposed solitude. In this meditative literary essay, the acclaimed novelist overcomes loneliness to discover an interior voice that celebrates life in the connections to others. She finds the source of her creativity.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Like most of us, Doris Grumbach has lived her life surrounded by others. Then last year, faced with a rare opportunity to experiment with solitude, she decided to live in her coastal Maine home, rarely 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. Overcoming initial loneliness and fears about what she might find out about herself in the absence of company, Grumbach begins to discover an interior voice focused on "inconsequential things," the things she had overlooked in her hunger for what she had once before considered important. With the writing of D. M. Thomas, Paul Auster, and others, and the paintings of Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, and Pablo Picasso to guide her self-discovery, Grumbach returns to her inner self and the source of her creativity.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly