The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany

Biographies & Memoirs

Grumbach, Doris

Leaders & Notable People

Beacon Press

The Missing Person is a tellingly achieved fusion of thought and action and the most fully realized evocation of Hollywood themes in a long, long time.” ―Alan Cheuse, Los Angeles Herald ExaminerThe Missing Person is a daring work that tells the story of Franny Fuller, the sexy, voluptuous movie star whose glorious blonde mane and whispery voice have aroused the fascination of every gossip columnist and moviegoer in the country. But beneath her radiant, compelling image lives still the frightened little girl from upstate New York. Define only by the way the studios, the flacks, her husbands and lovers, and the public perceive her, Franny Fuller is a “missing person,” no more tangible than the image projected of her on a thousand silver screens. Framing her portrait of Franny Fuller within a persuasive and moving story, Doris Grumbach has created a haunting work that probes the private misery behind public glamour.

The Missing Person

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

The novelist's journal, written as a celebration of her seventieth year, relates the milestones, mishaps, losses, friendships, and decisions that shaped her life

Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir

United States

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Extra Innings: A Memoir

Extra Innings continues the intense, sometimes funny, sometimes tart, and sometimes very moving account of a closely examined life begun by Doris Grumbach in her widely praised day book Coming into the End Zone. That earlier book chronicles the author's seventy-first year, a time of both struggle against and acceptance of the encroachments of old age. Extra Innings begins two years later, on the publication date of its predecessor, its author exposed to all the exquisitely mingled hopes and fears of sending a book into the world. In this case, though, each review offered Doris Grumbach not only an opinion of her book, but something of a mirror in which she could see herself as the world sees her - or her self-portrait. It proves a somewhat disorienting route to self-knowledge. And so begins another eventful year - crowded with the literary pleasures (and pains) of a life spent reading and writing; the natural beauties and social particulars of life in coastal Maine; the mingled joys and affronts of travel to New York, Washington, Mexico; and, always, the looming presence of illness and mortality, the author's own and her daughter's as well. Extra Innings is, finally, a book about the successful search for home, the end of a journey to the Cove in Sargentville, Maine, where the serene landscape to be viewed from Grumbach's study comes to match the inward landscape of memory and well-earned peace.

Arts & Literature

Norton

Meeting in 1929 on the brink of adolescence, four children who were raised in isolation by a widowed mother grow into young men and women whose lives are marked by incest, homosexuality, and celibacy.

The Book of Knowledge: A Novel

History & Criticism

Started on the eve of the author's seventieth birthday, this year-long journal records the process of slowly slipping into old age, including coming to terms with losses and with powerful memories. Reprint.

"I believe Chamber Music will be a classic. It deserves to be." ―Alice Walker Caroline Maclaren, the ninety-year-old widow of a famous American composer, reaches back into her memories to tell the story of their life together. In setting the stage for her extraordinary tale, she recreates the aura of turn-of-the-century Frankfurt, Boston, and Saratoga Springs and of an age when private passions were hidden below the surfaces of private selves. She recalls her marriage as a sheltered young woman to the brilliantly promising Robert Maclaren, his swift rise to international musical fame, the darker story of his angry silences, and eventually, the grim details of his illness and death. In the final phase of her story she tells of the late-blossoming passion she discovers with Anna, the serene nurse who tended Robert in his dying days, and about the artists' colony they found as a tribute to his life and work.

Chamber Music

W.W.Norton&Company

The Missing Person is a tellingly achieved fusion of thought and action and the most fully realized evocation of Hollywood themes in a long, long time.” ―Alan Cheuse, Los Angeles Herald ExaminerThe Missing Person is a daring work that tells the story of Franny Fuller, the sexy, voluptuous movie star whose glorious blonde mane and whispery voice have aroused the fascination of every gossip columnist and moviegoer in the country. But beneath her radiant, compelling image lives still the frightened little girl from upstate New York. Define only by the way the studios, the flacks, her husbands and lovers, and the public perceive her, Franny Fuller is a “missing person,” no more tangible than the image projected of her on a thousand silver screens. Framing her portrait of Franny Fuller within a persuasive and moving story, Doris Grumbach has created a haunting work that probes the private misery behind public glamour.

The Magician's Girl tells the story of three New York women who meet at Barnard in the late 1930s and fulfill their separate destinies from the 1940s to 1978. Lyrical, dramatic, and wise, Grumbach's novel is rich with evocations of America's past, from the flavors of New York City to academic life in the 1970s.

The Magician's Girl

Literary

The Ladies

“Grumbach is acutely sensitive to the quiet hum of everyday living and the small acquired habits that bond lovers over long periods. It is especially touching to watch the women age as the pages turn, affecting a kind of time-lapse realism that doesn’t diminish the Ladies’ passion or love for each other.” ―Diane Salvatore, Ms.The Ladies is a touching, imaginative retelling of the story of two of history’s most interesting characters: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, well-born Irish women who defied all conventions of their eighteenth-century Irish homeland and eloped to the small hamlet of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived as a married couple. There, removed from the eyes of the world, they hoped to live out their quiet lives. But the world outside gradually came to claim the Ladies―first out of curiosity, but eventually on the basis of profound respect, and even love. Visited by such luminaries as Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Horace Walpole, among many others, Eleanor and Sarah became known throughout Britain and to history as the “Ladies of Llangollen.”

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Books by Grumbach, Doris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grumbach, Doris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany

The Missing Person

Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir

Extra Innings: A Memoir

The Book of Knowledge: A Novel

Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir

Chamber Music

The Missing Person

The Magician's Girl

The Ladies