Customer Reviews

The Pleasure of their Company

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Doris Grumbach provides a warm reflection on what it means to live life beautifully. "This is the summer of my unexpected content. In a very real way, I find that I am living with my dead friends." At first she is saddened by how many good friends have passed on, yet soon she realizes that the friendships remain alive in her, her memories, and in books and articles that they wrote or enjoyed together.

This awareness grows as she plans her own 80th birthday, an event that she would normally have not looked forward to. Instead, she makes a lot of new beginnings. She trades in her old car for a year-old Toyota. She takes on a kitten as a pet. She shops for new clothes for the party. She has the yard redone for the party. She returns to a long abandoned manuscript for a novel. And she frets a lot about getting ready for the party.

While all this is going on, she rereads her favorite books, examines what others have said about turning 80, and reminisces. That's when she begins to enjoy herself with her wonderful friends of the past.

Few of us have reached 80, yet most of us have met someone who has. Like all milestones, it offers a chance to reflect. These wonderful thoughts, so beautifully expressed, are a gift to us all that we can begin to enjoy -- even though we may be younger or older than 80.

I remember giving my Father a bottle of port that was very old for his 80th birthday, and asking him questions about what happens to port with age. He kept answering that it gets better, and that insight helped him to many new beginnings in his 80s.

I often encourage people to adopt a ageless perspective on their lives. Enjoy the optimism of youth, tempered by the experience of maturity, extended by the connections of age, and expanded by the time to explore regardless of your current chronological age. This book is written in a way that is very consistent with that stallbusting mindset.

Regardless of your age, you can learn valuable life lessons from The Pleasure of Their Company.

Enjoy!

As Grumbach is planning her 80th birthday party, she reflects on friends both living and dead as well as writers and books and assorted artists that've given her joy over the years. A graceful and sometimes humorous memoir about coming to terms with aging and about how the dead live on in and around the living. Grumbach's style of writing is as crisp as the weather in Maine, and equally embracing.

It is always a pleasure to be in the company of Doris Grumbach and spending time in the pages of her newest (slim) memoir is no exception. Nearing 80, Grumbach plans a party for her friends and in the process, introduces us to influential friends who are no longer with us & are therefore unable to attend her gathering. The book is filled with quotes and reflections about the aging/old age process-- both the positives and the negatives. After reading her book, you'll want to "chain" to the authors she cites (May Sarton, Thomas Merton, Virginia Woolf) and wish you had received an invitation to her party.

Doris does it again. She knows life and she knows how to reflect on her own long one in a way that you just keep wondering, "How does this woman DO this? How can she remember so MUCH?" I have learned to keep a pen and note cards handy when I read Doris, because there are so many other books and authors mentioned - and they all sound so GOOD! I want to read them all, although I know there will never be time. This book was written on the occasion of her approaching eightieth birthday. Perhaps if I live that long ...? This is simply a terrific book. She must be nearly ninety by now, but I hope Doris Grumbach keeps writing and reflecting as long as she possibly can. I love her stuff. - Tim Bazzett, author of the Reed City Boy trilogy