Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place (Hardcover)

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Product Description

What does it mean to belong to a place, to be truly rooted and grounded in the place you call home? How do you commit to a marriage, to a full partnership with another person, and still maintain your own separate identity? These questions have been central to Susan Wittig Albert's life, and in this beautifully written memoir, she movingly describes how she has experienced place, marriage, and aloneness while creating a home in the Texas Hill Country with her husband and writing partner, Bill Albert.

Together, Alone opens in 1985, as Albert leaves a successful, if rootless, career as a university administrator and begins a new life as a freelance writer, wife, and homesteader on a patch of rural land northwest of Austin. She vividly describes the work of creating a home at Meadow Knoll, a place in which she and Bill raised their own food and animals, while working together and separately on writing projects. Once her sense of home and partnership was firmly established, Albert recalls how she had to find its counterbalance--a place where she could be alone and explore those parts of the self that only emerge in solitude. For her, this place was Lebh Shomea, a silent monastic retreat. In writing about her time at Lebh Shomea, Albert reveals the deep satisfaction she finds in belonging to a community of people who have chosen to be apart and experience silence and solitude.

About the Author

SUSAN WITTIG ALBERT is the author of popular mysteries, including the acclaimed China Bayles series; books for young adults; and books for women on life-writing and work. A graduate of the University of Illinois (Urbana) and the University of California at Berkeley, she is a former university English professor and administrator. In 1997, she founded the Story Circle Network, a nonprofit organization for women who want to write about their lives.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 196 pages
• Publisher: University of Texas Press (September 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292719701
• ISBN-13: 978-0292719705
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #24,431 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remembering, Discovering, August 18, 2009

By	Story Circle Book Reviews (www.storycirclebookreviews.org) - See all my reviews

Okay, Susan Wittig Albert has done it to me. I live in a rented house with no yard on a busy street in the fourth largest city in the United States; and I just bought a fall tomato plant. I've learned that I need to move toward making this place--my place--my home. It's back to the land for me, even if it is only of few square feet of soil I don't own. That's merely part of what this memoir and meditation has done to me and for me. Albert's careful consideration of her marriage, her places, and herself, not using merely memory ("that notoriously unreliable beast") but a judicious culling from years of daily journals, is insightful and enjoyable. As a longtime reader of both Albert's fiction and nonfiction, I expected a lot; I was not disappointed.

More than twenty years ago, a somewhat battered RV rolled to a stop atop a hill just where the dry and arid land of west Texas stretches out leaving the more verdant landscapes to the east. This was a divide in the lives of the two passengers. In their midlives, Susan Wittig and Bill Albert were beginning a huge adventure launching a marriage and a joint writing career, while finding the place to create their new and shared home.

In the pages of Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, Albert offers her reader views and glimpses not only of the marriage, but of the places that became a part of the relationship and a part of her as an individual. She states clearly this is her "public self, the self I like to present to the world." While presenting this public self, she also skillfully recounts the unfolding of her life that bought her to this point.

Here is the story of the marriage from its beginning in 1987. Here are the questions they asked themselves parked on that hilltop. Where should they place this new shared life? Was it even going to work? "...we judged it an iffy proposition at best." Albert traces the conversion of five acres of lonely land owned by Bill Albert into Meadow Knoll, a working, loved home.

Albert brings her reader to the land, from its geography and geology to the people who knew it--whether passing through or calling it home--for the centuries before it became Meadow Knoll. She traces the transformation of "the" place into "their" place. Trees and buildings were no longer anonymous; they received names. Animals were born and crops planted. (Hence, my tomato plant!) This became the place they, both of them, belonged.

As their life together unfolded, Albert discovered yet another Susan, one who needed silence, to be alone, to be apart. This was not to leave the marriage, the place, the growing career, but to enhance. To develop this solitary person required not only introspection but another place. Here, Lebb Shomea, a silent retreat center in South Texas, enters the tale. Albert has found her place to be alone just as Meadow Knoll is her place of community, and, again, she uses the story of the land to enhance the telling of an odyssey of the spirit.

Many of us, for many reasons, are not as deeply attached to a place as Albert is both to Meadow Knoll and to Lebb Shomea, yet her descriptions, not only of these locations but of their importance in her life, certainly will make any reader pause to consider the places that have been and are critical to the living of her own life.

Both as a contemporary of Albert and as the survivor, explorer, and beneficiary of a long marriage (even longer than the Alberts') I read this book with a head often nodding in agreement and from time to time with eyes brimming with tears both from searing memories and laughter. Other long-time marriage veterans will readily identify with this memoir. But that is certainly not the only appeal. Those starting on the journey will find a useful roadmap, while those in mid-journey will find encouragement that much lies ahead.

Albert's many readers will be pleased and perhaps inspired by her account of her writing career. She shares its blossoming from a precarious beginning with writing-for-hire jobs to the full bloom of best sellers.

All readers should receive inspiration to dig out their own journals, sit, reflect, and then begin to record their own life experiences. Tomorrow, borrowing the excellent epigram of this book's prologue from Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, "As we discover, we remember, remembering we discover," I will dive into the closet, dig through the boxes of my own journals and begin my own discoveries.

by Patricia Nordyke Pando
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women