Drinking the Rain: A Memoir [Paperback]

Alix Kates Shulman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 5, 2004

At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast. Living without plumbing, electricity, or a telephone, she discovered in herself a new independence and a growing sense of oneness with the world that redefined her notions of waste, time, necessity, and pleasure. With wit, lyricism, and fearless honesty, Shulman describes a quest that speaks to us all: to build a new life of creativity and spirituality, self-reliance and self-fulfillment.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In an elegant text, Shulman (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen) describes the results of her abrupt decision, at the age of 50, to spend summers in a crude cabin on an island off the Maine coast. Her aim was to leave behind a hectic life in New York City?"waste; consumption; conflict; politics"?and a crumbling marriage: "Though we were yoked together for decades, I feel as threatened as if he were the hacker." In their place she seeks to discover "who I am when the tide runs out." She means this quite literally; during 10 years spent living in an isolated house with no plumbing or electricity, Shulman let the rough beach beyond her door become her physical and intellectual sustenance. The potential for sentimentality is undercut by Shulman's evocative, witty and subtle prose and by her rueful awareness of civilization's assault on the fragile environment. 25,000 first printing
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Novelist Shulman (In Every Woman's Life..., LJ 6/1/87) here tries her hand at feminist autobiography, detailing, in graceful and readable prose, the story of her midlife transformation. She leaves her writer and political activist's life in New York City for solitary habitation on an island off the coast of Maine, discovering there an abundance of life at its most elemental. Living in a cabin without indoor plumbing or heating, she spends her days writing and foraging for meals among tidal pools and sandy beaches. Through her solitary experience, she discovers the interconnectedness of all life, even the ties between her city life, with all its bustle and waste, and her life on this island. At age 50, Shulman experiences new love (replacing years of a troubled marriage) as well as renewed threats to her sense of self. Highly recommended, especially for libraries serving middle-aged readers in search of renewal.?Marie L. Lally, Alabama Sch. of Mathematics & Science, Mobile
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; 1st edition (July 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865476977
• ISBN-13: 978-0865476974
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #645,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Alix attended public schools and planned to be a lawyer like her dad. But in college at Case Western Reserve University she was smitten by philosophy and upon graduation moved to New York City to study philosophy at Columbia grad school. After some years as an encyclopedia editor, she enrolled at New York University, where she took a degree in mathematics, and later, while raising two children, an MA in Humanities.

She became a civil rights activist in 1961 and a feminist activist in 1967, published her first book in 1970, and taught her first class in 1973--all lifelong pursuits that have found their way into her books.

Having explored in her novels the challenges of youth and midlife, in her memoirs she has probed the later stages in the ongoing drama of her generation of women, taking on the terrors and rewards of solitude, of her parents' final years, and of her late-life calling as caregiver to her beloved husband, with whom she lives in New York City.

She is the author of:

five novels:
Ménage
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Burning Questions
On the Stroll
In Every Woman's Life...

three memoirs:
Drinking the Rain
A Good Enough Daughter
To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed

selected essays:
A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing

two books on the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman:
To the Barricades (biography)
Red Emma Speaks (collection)

and three books for children:
Bosley on the Number Line
Awake and Asleep
Finders Keepers.

For more information, see AlixKShulman.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Stay with it April 14, 2002

By Alex Nichols

Format:Paperback

I must confess I almost couldn't get through "Drinking the Rain". Kates Shulman's account of a citified feminist's return to nature seemed an unintential parody, not helped by the comically overstated title. But midway through Ms. Shulman's story I became hooked. What seemed at first a pretentious and self-important rant transformed into a thoughtful and evocotive musing on what it is to be an artist. Ironically, it's only after Shulman returned to the city (and later goes to teach in Colorado) that the book came alive for me. Her descriptions of dinner with an old feminist friend left me teary eyed at their simple eloquence, and the descriptions of a snowy Colorado reunion with her kids kept me reading. By the end, I adored this story.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A passionate, intimate memoir May 23, 2004

By Lynn Harnett TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Ten years ago Shulman went to her family's primitive cabin on Long Island, Maine, for a summer of solitude. A New Yorker through and through, she was apprehensive and fearful, but also excited and determined. Her life was vaguely dissatisfying and she was looking for a change.

Reading her memoir is like having a personal conversation with the author. Her tone is personal and intimate. When she stands back for a moment, picturing herself through a passing stranger's averted eye - a middle-aged lady in floppy hat and mismatched tennis shoes, gathering weeds in a basket - we too are startled and amused, having been looking from the inside out.

Shulman, recognized for her novels and feminism, reaches her cross-roads at age 50. Her children are grown, her relationship with her husband is a distant truce, the feminist movement has stalled, and her life is overfull of busyness.

But the birth of a new passion in her life is serendipitous. Always an adventurous cook, she finds her lengthy trips to the uninspiring island grocery a jarring intrusion on her pleasing solitude and a chore contrary to her new motto, "Do only what you like, nothing you don't!"

From years before she remembers mussel gathering, one of the few pleasures of the hurried vacations she had always hated. In those years, with small children and a domineering, orchestrating husband, the summer cabin, with no electicity or plumbing had meant a round of endless drudgery.

Now that she has only to please herself, mussel hunting is merely the first of her pleasures. Around her a world unfolds. Armed with Euell Gibbons and determination, she reaps the bounty of wild things, spending her days in exploration and discovery.

She finds in herself a new tranquility and simplicity which, as she feared, is invaded by New York's cosmopolitan pace and abundance. The reader is a bit ahead of her here, exhorting Shulman to enjoy what the city has to offer, just as she enjoys her island.

And when the author does absorb our advice (given to her by an old childhood friend at a party), she embraces it fully, applying this tactic to her whole life. Thus, when she accepts a position at the University of Colorado, she plunges into an exploration of New Age mysticism, health foods, mountain hiking and Buddhism. You don't have to share her interests to find her open-minded approach admirable.

There are upheavels too. Her children are less than thrilled in the back-to-nature changes in their New Yorker mother. Her husband shatters a summer's idyll at the island by sending divorce papers. And romantic love, with all its joy, threatens to disrupt her solitary self. As I said, you don't have to agree.

But through it all, Shulman struggles to maintain her equilibrium, making deliberate choices, letting her thoughts range free. She is enchanted by the wholeness of things - how all of nature interrelates - and then dismayed as pollution from the cities and radiation from Chernobyll threatens her island haven.

This is a memoir of continuous awakening and endless dialogue with the self and the world. There's helplessness, anger, hope and love and inspiration. It's a joy to read.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars drinking the inspiration September 16, 2000

By A. Brecher

Format:Paperback

Shulman raises many provocative ideas in her memoir. Among the ones that affected me most profoundly are Solitude, Rebirth, Self-Sufficiency, and the utilization of the resources in your own environment.

If you've ever feared that the possibilities for excitement, adventure, wonderment, or simply change- shrink with age, you will be inspired by Shulman's resolve to continue searching for meaning and discovery in her life at fifty and well beyond. What courage to embark on a new and thoroughly independent life after decades of playing the role of wife and mother. But Shulman is not a super human. She does not possess some rarefied quality that we could not all find nestled in our spirit. We walk with her down the beach of her island past a barking and threatening dog. She has always held an irrational fear of dogs though never has she actually had a bad experience with one. Her instinct is to turn back, but instead she contemplates the nature of fear and how best to conquer it, and she decides the best thing is to face it. So she continues on, if somewhat cautiously.

This book will mark you, if you let it. I come away feeling better equipped to face my barking island dogs. I am more observant and appreciative of my surroundings. And I will never see myself as stuck in a single way of life, never let the light of change and possibility elude me.