Fifty Days of Solitude

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.