The Leaving Season

A Memoir in Essays

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Pub Date 09 May 2023 | Archive Date 30 Apr 2023

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Description

A memoir in intimate essays navigating marriage and motherhood, art and ambition, grief and nostalgia, and the elusive concept of home.

Kelly McMasters found herself in her mid-thirties living her fantasy: she’d moved with her husband, a painter, from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, where their children roamed idyllic acres in rainboots and diapers. The pastoral landscape and the bookshop they opened were restorative at first, for her and her marriage. But soon, she was quietly plotting her escape.

In The Leaving Season, McMasters chronicles the dissolution of her relationship and the complexities of single-motherhood, delving into the tricky and often heart-wrenching balance between seeing and being seen; loss and longing; desire and doubt; and the paradox of leaving what you love in order to survive. Whether considering masculinity in the countryside through the life of a freemartin calf, the vulnerability of new motherhood in the wake of a car crash, or the power of community pulsing through an independent bookshop, The Leaving Season finds in every ending a new beginning.

About the Author: Kelly McMasters is the author of Welcome to Shirley, an Orion Book Award finalist, and coeditor of the anthologies This Is the Place, a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice," and the forthcoming Wanting

A memoir in intimate essays navigating marriage and motherhood, art and ambition, grief and nostalgia, and the elusive concept of home.

Kelly McMasters found herself in her mid-thirties living her...


Advance Praise

"I loved this profound and beautiful book so much I want to press a copy into the hands of everyone I pass on the street. 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

"In her gorgeously written memoir, The Leaving Season, 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 felt 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

"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. ‘There is,’ Kelly McMasters writes, ‘no factchecking for nostalgia,’ and in these essays proceeds to lay 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. From ‘living a trope’ as an artist's bohemian girlfriend in Brooklyn to living the ‘fantasy’ of moving to the country, opening a bookshop, parenting one's children close to nature, McMaster's work vibrates with her longing for life to be as it seems, and everyone 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

"I loved this profound and beautiful book so much I want to press a copy into the hands of everyone I pass on the street. Never have I encountered a memoir that explores motherhood and marriage with...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9780393541052
PRICE $29.95 (USD)
PAGES 288

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