The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays

Musings on art, marriage, and motherhood animate this beautifully written collection from Hofstra University English professor McMasters (Welcome to Shirley). In the opener, McMasters signals that her marriage is doomed. She then leaves that idea to simmer in the background as she covers her life before and after meeting her husband, R. She writes with humor about her first job out of college as an assistant at a Manhattan law firm (“I felt like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl”), and with palpable terror about barely surviving 9/11. Elsewhere, she discusses the “brutality” of “part-time country houses turned full-time residences” after she left New York City with R. and their two children for a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania that brought her closer to the elements than she was used to. Their choice to leave the city marked the beginning of the end for McMasters, who grew restless as she ran a bookshop and cared for the children while R. painted and drifted away. Eventually, the couple divorced, and McMasters adjusted to life as a single mother. McMasters suffuses these essays with compassion and curiosity, neither pulling her punches nor succumbing to bitterness. The result is a powerfully candid ode to difficult endings. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (May)