The Pleasure of Their Company: A Memoir

A literary master looks ahead to her eighties

As her eightieth birthday approaches, Doris Grumbach does not feel melancholy or saddened by the upcoming event, despite the loss of friends such as Kay Boyle and Dorothy Day—instead she takes it as an opportunity both to look backward and to grow. In this, her summer of unexpected content, Grumbach weaves the elegiac and the practical into a delightful tapestry of experience.
 
She looks deep into her own history, telling stor…