Fifty Days of Solitude

Fifty days of peace; fifty days without the noises that so distract all of us; fifty days of journaling discovering our real feelings. This beautiful memoir is a gift to all who have wondered what it would be like to get to the core of who we really are. I loved it.

A thoughtful book, I recommend Fifty Days of Solitude. Alone at home during a period of self-imposed seclusion, Doris Grumbach offers a helpful meditation on the meaning of solitude, telling of her time weighing and considering a range of questions, her search for answers, and a report of lessons learned. Her solitude affords her time to delve into remembered ideas from art and a lifetime of reading. Quoting artists and authors, she conducts her own Socratic dialogues, following Bacon's admonition for book readers that "some few are to be chewed and digested." She also explores her thoughts about friends and friendships; thoughts about loneliness versus solitude; about the crowding out of "white spaces" where much meaning is often missed; about the need for learning "to look hard at what she did not notice before and even harder at what is not there, at what Paul Valery called `the presence of absence.'" She has an interesting insight about the role of solitude in life and her failure to appreciate it as a gift when young, recalling two brief periods when she lived alone. She recognizes that opportunities for reflection are more difficult for her in the noisy city. She learns that solitude nourishes her energy and promotes creativity; her writing becomes more satisfying and more productive. The day's mail disrupts her routine. It invades her seclusion bringing reports of unwelcomed events in friend's lives--illness, death, disgrace. These letters, with news clippings, from friends, take her away from her writing. She receives a particularly disquieting report about a much-admired friend and respected teacher who has been indicted. His disturbing fall leads her to think about a characteristic of American society: "too often achievement and recognition come early and too fast, leaving a long life of disappointment and decline.'" Finally, as her self-imposed seclusion ends, she reaches some final thoughts about solitude: "If I have learned anything in these days, it is that the proper conditions for productive solitude are old age and the outside presence of a small portion of the beauty of the world. Given these, and the drive to explore and understand an inner territory, solitude can be an enlivening, even exhilarating experience."

For most of us, social interaction is a daily aspect of life. Solitude is suspect rather than pursued. In this peaceful, exquisitely penned memoir novelist Doris Grumbach recounts her 50 days of absolute aloneness during a Maine winter. "I learned that there is a softness about being alone in the country, even the frozen, snow-filled country," she writes. "Solidity, concrete, and bricks do not define one's surroundings. The edges of my landscape are blurred, made uneven by the action of wind and bending branches. There is comforting balm in the way the water beyond the white meadow breaks through the ice when the tide comes in and then freezes over in irregular ridges when it goes out." Grumbach turned off the telephone, did not watch television. She went into town only to collect her mail and attend church, always leaving before the end of the service so as not to be drawn into any conversation. Her only companions were music, books, and herself. As she said, "I was now alone with music, books, an unpopulated cove, and with that frightening reflexive pronoun, myself." This pensive superbly written reminiscence may have been intended as her nod to mortality, instead it is a paean to life. Don't miss it! - Gail Cooke

This slim, spare book touches on many of the gravest issues of our time while avoiding both smug solemnity and grinning uplift. Grumbach's voice is considered, flinty even, much like the wintery Maine landscape detailed in the book. As her days of solitude progress she writes of history, piety, AIDS, the experience of aging, the borders between the individual and the community, and the often invisible lives of women. She watches everything and lets that observation live on the page without forcing conclusions onto it. This is a profoundly religious book, and a profoundly feminist one. It wrestles with sacredness, without the silly cliches of so much writing about "the sacred". Its rectitude and honesty are a rebuke to much of the fuzzy-minded writing out there.

I first read this book about 3 years ago. I don't read many books by writers about writing, and I don't read many autobiographical books by writers, period. However, I read the first few pages of this book, and I was captivated.She moved herself into an isolated country house for 50 days.Grumbach's style is simple, plain, and direct. Her book is a study of one person's solitude; as such, it works well as a personal "coming of age" story. That may strike you as odd, because Grumbach is probably in her 50's or 60's, but it's a personal journey story, a tale of one person's finding herself, of imposing a solitary life upon herself. It's about solitude, and adjusting yourself from a more frenetic way of life to a simpler way of life, socially.I generally don't read this sort of thing at all, but I loved this book.