The first book by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach is an intimate, personal collection of essays, remembrances, and columns that follows in the creative nonfiction tradition of Anna Quindlen and May Sarton. While it recounts the experience and observations of a divorced, working mother, it expresses hopes and fears universal to all women. Steinbach focuses on the big and small things of life: the bond between lifelong friends; coming to grips with loss; the quiet, everyday moments between parents and child; the spiritual connection to nature; the realities of being a single parent. She writes of the people who've touched her own life: the influential teacher; the worldly aunt; the writer hero; the woman she sees regularly at a bus stop as both head to work. She offers us beautifully written lessons she's learned during a lifetime of changes and challenges.
"Steinbach, a columnist and feature writer for the Baltimore Sun and 1985 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, presents in her first book an open, honest, charming, and witty collection of personal essays. Focusing on the familiar, Steinbach relates private thoughts and remembrances of people who influenced her, the loss of loved ones, childhood follies and fantasies, the ever-present
Library Journal
"In this collection of her essays and columns, Pulitzer Prize-winning Baltimore Sun journalist Steinbach seeks to "rescue from insignificance some of the small events that make up a life." These pieces thus explore, with quiet grace, the unexpected pleasures that are gleaned from an appreciation of the "ordinary": a sleeping cat, a blooming garden, a well-cooked meal. Such familiar - even ostensib
