Still Life with Chickens
Starting Over in a House by the Sea
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"Frank, funny and helpful."—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For the millions who loved A Year by the Sea comes a memoir of a woman who awakens at midlife to find wisdom in a most unlikely place
In this beautifully written and frequently funny memoir, Catherine Goldhammer, newly separated, along with her twelve-year-old daughter, starts life anew in a cottage by the sea, in a rustic town where live bait is sold from vending machines. Partly to please her daughter and partly for reasons not clear to her at the time, she begins this year of transition by purchasing six baby chickens—whose job, she comes to suspect, is to pull her and her daughter forward out of one life and into another.
An unforgettable story filled with hope and grace, Still Life with Chickens shows how transcendent wisdom can be found in the most unlikely of places.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From her book's opening lines, Goldhammer admits to the many insecurities she faced during her year of transition during which she gets a divorce, slides "about three tax brackets poorer," relocates to a tattered New England cottage and singlehandedly raises her 12-year-old daughter, as well as half a dozen chicks while cheekily setting herself apart from her competition in the memoir genre: "I did not have a year in Provence or a villa under the Tuscan sun. I did not have a farm in Africa." Goldhammer, a published poet, has an eye for life's mundane details, and these minutiae can grow tiresome ("We went through two mops, several sponges.... We broke one mop right in half"). But her recounting of her frustrations and her joys while remodeling the house and rearing the chickens is not only amusing but sometimes reads like a self-help manual, in which readers conclude that rolling up one's sleeves, getting busy and staying occupied with any strange new interest can successfully distract one from life's larger trials. As Goldhammer notes, "I had thought I was renovating a house. I didn't know that in the process I would also rebuild my life."
