Light Years Book

In this searching memoir, Le Anne Schreiber explores the shifts of perspective that accompany a growing intimacy with death. Deeply moving, graced with subtle intelligence and humor, Light Years looks mortality in the eye and stares it down. In the background are three deaths occurring over five years—those of the author's mother, father, and brother. In the foreground are stories of certain simple elements of her life during this period—of a barn cat, impaled by a hunter's arrow, that she patiently nurses back to health; of a trout stream, whose raging waters thwart her attempt to release her father's ashes; of an overgrown acre that stubbornly refuses to be tamed.

Gradually, she traces the impact of these deaths on her understanding of such basic concepts as home, time, and territory, and her own textured past. Searching throughout this remarkable book for this-worldly sources of consolation, she finds them in unexpected places: long swims, a dream, an ancient oak, a book on Einstein, the view from a nearby hilltop.

Light Years bears witness to the shock of death, but even more to a vital and questing inner life, a rare triumph of understanding, and the discovery of vast open horizons, only light years away. This unforgettable memoir is filled with light.

Publishers Weekly

This small and intimate book conjures up an essential image of a writer, full of perceptions and a wealth of memories, sitting alone at a desk crafting them into carefully honed sentences alive with sudden, sometimes painful insights. Schreiber probably writes with a computer, yet her readers will picture her by an open window with a pad and pencil or at most a manual typewriter. After leaving the hectic world of Manhattan journalism (sports editor of the New York Times, then an editor of the Book Review), Schreiber chose to live in the quiet Columbia County community of Ancram in upstate New York. She learned to accept being an outsider, to relish the growth of milkweed and the arrival of the monarch butterflies. She also draws on her surroundings and the personality of her old house to accept the deaths of her mother and father, followed by that of her only brother. Inevitably, this leads her to the contemplation of her own mortality. This is spare and intense writing that speculates about why we are the way we are, and how we are formed by our own thoughts. Few have either the aptitude or the opportunity for such reflection. To share it is a rare privilege. First serial to Glamour; author tour. (Sept.)