Memoir ruminations - A New Kind of Country by Dorothy Gilman

A New Kind of Country by Dorothy Gilman

I’ve always enjoyed memoirs by authors, they’re so vivid. Gilman was a particular favorite author of mine growing up. (Her mysteries feature an irrepressible widow and grandmother in her sixties who is recruited by the CIA.)

This is one of those small memoirs of fascinating thoughts and observations. The book begins well after Gilman’s divorce as her second son goes off to college. She decides to move from Suburban New York to the coast of Nova Scotia.

For someone who went from her parent’s home to living with a husband then having two children, the solitude is quite different. At the same time, there is more of a sense of community in the little village than she is used to.

One night she goes to bed at 10 instead of her customary 11, turning out the lights, and her neighbor calls, concerned she might be ill. “Was she alright? Did she need anything?”

 “…there are some pleasing aspects to this after years spent in cities where one could die in June and nobody notice until Christmas.”

It was fascinating to me to read of her experiencing being alone and the things she did living in the country for the first time in her forties, much as I had experienced them on my own in my twenties, before I was married and had a child.

The life of a lobstering village is fascinating, and sad as well. It’s a fruitful and rewarding but dangerous life, as has always been for men making their living on the sea.

She describes the boats going out en masse on the first day of lobster season, and the comings and goings thereafter, along with her first humorous foray to the docks to buy some lobster for herself.

“One felt that if the economy of the entire world collapsed it would make no palpable change in their lives; the affluent years were only a mild surprise in a long succession of government miscalculations. They would continue to chop their own wood, plant their vegetables, bake their own bread.”

The book is split between exploring this new world she is living in, and the inner world she now has the solitude to explore. She ruminates on one of my favorite topics, time. 

“Yet the mystery is this: that whether we experience time quantitatively or qualitatively, time hasn’t changed at all, it’s we who have changed.” 

I highly recommend this book.

Storymusing.blogspot.com Review ~ by Michelle Wells