"[McMasters] rhapsodically renders the experience of living at one with the natural world… A frank, introspective memoir of divorce, creativity, and the sacrifices of motherhood."— Kirkus Reviews
"A wise, honest, and completely absorbing memoir of marriage and motherhood that is particular in the details but universal in a way that will resonate with many readers."— Booklist
"McMasters's masterful, moving memoir of her journey from the city to the country to the suburbs makes an excellent case for taking the time to figure [out who you are], no matter how frightening it seems."— BookPage
"McMasters’ writing shares some of its DNA with Leslie Jamison and Rebecca Solnit... The Leaving Season is a candid, often wrenching account of a relationship’s slow, inexorable crumbling and a survivor’s attempt to climb from the ruin and build a new life. Kelly McMasters is a graceful, fluid writer, and though the subject matter of her memoir is anything but easy, the rewards of sharing her company on the page are undeniable."— BookReporter
"In her gorgeously written memoir, Kelly McMasters navigates through—and ultimately out of—the very real yet unmappable space that a marriage occupies. Her story is one of a kind and yet pieces feel familiar: the gradual estrangement, the power imbalances, the anguish around the decision to stay or go, and the surprising discovery that, as a single mother, ‘the load felt lighter, the house brighter.’ This book, written by a complete stranger, made me feel a sense of community. What a profound gift."— Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
"A profound and beautiful book.… Never have I encountered a memoir that explores motherhood and marriage with such warmth, intimacy, and wisdom. This is a book that will forever change the way you see your world—and yourself. If you loved Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble, you must read The Leaving Season immediately."— Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
"I tore through The Leaving Season as though I was on fire and had to finish reading it before I could reach a bucket of water. Kelly McMasters lays bare the vast, unchartable difference between the way things look from the outside and the experience of being inside a marriage, a painting, a place, a home. Anyone who has ever had to step outside of a picture in order to see it clearly will recognize the grief and triumph of her choices."— Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason
"The Leaving Season is an astoundingly gorgeous memoir of life and love and leaving. With devastating insight, Kelly McMasters paints a delicate portrait of love and home and what happens when it all falls apart. The Leaving Season is about how endings are beginnings and beginnings are things of beauty. With an eye for detail and empathetic and deeply human portraits of the communities she inhabits, McMasters has created a soul-deep work of aching beauty and stubborn hope. Written with lush prose and an expansive heart, both gentle and gut-wrenching, beautiful and profound, The Leaving Season is a work of wonder."— Lyz Lenz, author of Belabored
"Heart-wrenching and nuanced.… Kelly McMasters is a brave memoirist, walking us on a tightrope through the loss of a job, a city, a marriage, a bookstore, a farmhouse, and her interior life as she gains children, community, fiscal security, wisdom, and independence. She shows us how when our dreams unravel, we may restitch them anew. This is a book of mourning and its opposite—a hallelujah."— Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion
2023-03-08
A writer reflects on her decision to leave her marriage and her idyllic rural home.
McMasters begins this poignant memoir in essays with an anecdote about how, when her children were young, she was obsessed with fire safety. She was so “focused on preventing fires inside the house” that she failed to notice that her family was falling victim to a “less spectacularly dramatic catastrophe”: the dissolution of her marriage. In the next essay, “Intrepid,” McMasters backtracks, relating her arrival in New York City in 1998 to work as a corporate legal assistant. Disillusioned by big law, she moved into editorial work and started dating a painter, referred to as R. In the wake of 9/11, she and R. moved in together and eventually married. Soon after, the couple bought a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, and their fish-out-of-water experiences there form the heart of the book. McMasters and her husband joined an unofficial barn bar run by a group of chain-smoking local farmers, unearthed a brood of rabbits living under their house, and reckoned with hunting season for the first time. If the author occasionally describes the surrounding community with anthropological detachment, she rhapsodically renders the experience of living at one with the natural world. Living in the farmhouse, McMasters felt “a kind of cellular belonging” she hadn’t known since childhood, “as if the whole world belonged to me, every curving cattail, every sweet blossom of honeysuckle.” Still, trouble in paradise emerged, and her husband’s uncompromising devotion to his art, so alluring before, became problematic when McMasters gave birth to first one son and then another. Later, the couple opened a bookstore in a small neighboring town, a venture that was significant for the author in reclaiming her sense of self, even as it further exposed the fissures in her marriage. As meditation on motherhood, divorce, and creative work, the essays retread familiar territory, but the memoir is nevertheless appealing, told with candor and grace.
A frank, introspective memoir of divorce, creativity, and the sacrifices of motherhood.
