the leaving season a memoir in essays kelly mcmasters

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The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays Hardcover – 9 May 2023

Kelly McMasters found herself in her midthirties 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 heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating 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.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date 9 May 2023
• Dimensions 14.99 x 2.79 x 22.1 cm
• ISBN-10 0393541053
• ISBN-13 978-0393541052
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (9 May 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393541053
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393541052
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.99 x 2.79 x 22.1 cm
• 2,969 in Family & Marriage Biographies
• 6,271 in Motherhood (Books)
• 10,493 in Biographies about Artists, Architects & Photographers

About the author

Kelly mcmasters.

Kelly McMasters is the author of the forthcoming The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Newsday, and Time Out New York, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia's School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at TEDx, authors@google, and more, and has taught at mediabistro.com, Franklin & Marshall College, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY.

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The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays Hardcover – May 9 2023

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Kelly McMasters found herself in her midthirties 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 heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating 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.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher WW Norton
• Publication date May 9 2023
• Dimensions 14.99 x 2.79 x 22.1 cm
• ISBN-10 0393541053
• ISBN-13 978-0393541052
• See all details

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Product description, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ WW Norton (May 9 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393541053
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393541052
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 399 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.99 x 2.79 x 22.1 cm
• #4,188 in Literary Essays (Books)
• #8,239 in Gender Studies (Books)
• #9,607 in Short Story Anthologies

About the author

Kelly mcmasters.

Kelly McMasters is the author of the forthcoming The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Newsday, and Time Out New York, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia's School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at TEDx, authors@google, and more, and has taught at mediabistro.com, Franklin & Marshall College, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY.

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THE LEAVING SEASON

A memoir in essays.

by Kelly McMasters ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2023

A frank, introspective memoir of divorce, creativity, and the sacrifices of motherhood.

A writer reflects on her decision to leave her marriage and her idyllic rural home.

McMasters begins this poignant memoir in essays with an anecdote about how, when her children were young, she was obsessed with fire safety. She was so “focused on preventing fires inside the house” that she failed to notice that her family was falling victim to a “less spectacularly dramatic catastrophe”: the dissolution of her marriage. In the next essay, “Intrepid,” McMasters backtracks, relating her arrival in New York City in 1998 to work as a corporate legal assistant. Disillusioned by big law, she moved into editorial work and started dating a painter, referred to as R. In the wake of 9/11, she and R. moved in together and eventually married. Soon after, the couple bought a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, and their fish-out-of-water experiences there form the heart of the book. McMasters and her husband joined an unofficial barn bar run by a group of chain-smoking local farmers, unearthed a brood of rabbits living under their house, and reckoned with hunting season for the first time. If the author occasionally describes the surrounding community with anthropological detachment, she rhapsodically renders the experience of living at one with the natural world. Living in the farmhouse, McMasters felt “a kind of cellular belonging” she hadn’t known since childhood, “as if the whole world belonged to me, every curving cattail, every sweet blossom of honeysuckle.” Still, trouble in paradise emerged, and her husband’s uncompromising devotion to his art, so alluring before, became problematic when McMasters gave birth to first one son and then another. Later, the couple opened a bookstore in a small neighboring town, a venture that was significant for the author in reclaiming her sense of self, even as it further exposed the fissures in her marriage. As meditation on motherhood, divorce, and creative work, the essays retread familiar territory, but the memoir is nevertheless appealing, told with candor and grace.

Pub Date: May 9, 2023

ISBN: 9780393541052

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: March 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BOOK REVIEW

edited by Margot Kahn & Kelly McMasters

by Kelly McMasters

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New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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INTERVIEW: Kelly McMasters, Author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays

June 6, 2023.

Interview by Nicole Graev Lipson

When The Leaving Season opens, McMasters is a recent college graduate grappling her way through young adulthood in turn-of-the-millennium New York City. We accompany her as she witnesses, first-hand, the burning towers on 9/11; as she meets the charismatic artist who would become her husband; and as they move to a remote farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, eager to build a life together as newlyweds. From the outside, their pastoral existence with their two young sons appears idyllic, but beneath the surface of their marriage are deepening ruptures that eventually become too painful for McMasters to ignore, and she must find the courage to walk away from the dream she’s clung to.

McMasters’ book could accurately be described as a divorce memoir. But it’s much more than this: a meditation on nostalgia, an homage to the natural world, a critique of the hierarchies of gender, an illumination of the complexities of motherhood, an exploration of the tension between art-making and caregiving, a love song to the places that shape our lives—and a reminder that every ending contains the seed of a new beginning.

McMasters is the author of the memoir Welcome to Shirley and co-editor, with Margot Kahn, of the anthologies This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home and Wanting: Women Writing About Desire . Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review , The New York Times , The American Scholar , and River Teeth , among other publications. I had the pleasure of talking with her by phone about setting as a narrative tool, finding strength in female communion, and how every divorce has its start as a love story.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Photo by Sylvie Rosokoff

Nicole Graev Lipson: The memoir-in-essays is my ultimate favorite genre because it marries my other two favorite genres, essay and memoir. When you began this book, did you know from the start that this was the form it would take?

  Kelly McMasters: The very honest answer is no. I very much see myself as an essayist in terms of my natural rhythm in writing, and I started to write these essays as just that, individual essays. I began in earnest thinking about turning them into a book while working on This is the Place: Women Writing About Home , an anthology of essays I co-edited with Margot Khan. I wrote an essay for that book called “The Leaving Season”. It was the first thing I’d written in a very long time, and when I finished it, I realized I had a lot more to say. I thought to myself, “Okay, this is a thing . This is a book.”

NGL: The Leaving Season made me think a lot about the concept of place. You open the book in New York City, and then take us with you as you move, newly married, to a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania; then, as a newly separated mother, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and finally to suburban Long Island, vividly conjuring your relationship with each locale. I’m curious how you became interested in the idea of place, and why you felt drawn to explore it in both an anthology and a full-length memoir of your own?

  KM: At the center of This is the Place was the idea of home as a four letter word—the complication of what so many of us are programmed to think home should be and what happens when it isn’t. When I started co-editing that collection, the home that I thought I was going to be building for myself and for my children had just imploded. And yet there was something so elemental about those years in the country, in that natural landscape, that I did feel home there for the first time in many ways. That’s when I first understood that this was the pain of leaving: I knew I had to leave, and I really did not want to leave a lot of what I had to say goodbye to.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory was a really seminal book for me. When you’re excised from a place that you no longer have access to, it can become glamorized and romanticized. The home that I thought was going to be my home forever—with the piece of wood against the doorway with notches for every inch that our children grew—is gone. I can’t see it anymore. The only access I had was when I could sit down to the page and imagine it and access it that way.

NGL: When I was an MFA student, a beloved teacher of mine used to complain about all the location-less student writing she had to read, where the action takes place in a vacuum rather than a particular physical space. Your writing is extremely rooted in location and a beautiful example of the magic that can happen when place is given the attention it deserves. I’m curious how you think about setting as a writer?

KM: Thank you so much for noticing that. I also had a professor in grad school whom I’m still very close with, Sam Freedman, who would suggest during the process of revision to imagine your work on a stage. Is your play happening in a black box with no setting? And if it does have a setting, what can your audience see? Is one small room? Is it the entire country?

Since before I was able to give it that name or really understand what I was doing, setting has been primary to me. When I recall childhood memories, the first thing that comes to mind is the place and its sensory details. When I sit down and think about a story, the first thing I feel around in the dark for is the setting. Setting is kind of like my compass.

“When I sit down and think about a story, the first thing I feel around in the dark for is the setting. Setting is kind of like my compass.” — Kelly McMasters

NGL: As I’m sure you know, the word “essay” comes from the French word essaye r, meaning to attempt or try. Was there a central question you were trying to answer as you worked through the essays in this book?

KM: I think the trick of the memoir-in-essays is that each essay has its own questions. But in determining which essays stayed and which got the boot, I had to sit down and arrange them all on the floor with my color-coded index cards and figure out not just chronology, but the overall arc. I do think the main question—and it’s still an open question because I don’t think that I’ve solved it—is how to leave something you love. We leave things every day, and it’s not complicated. But leaving the big stuff? There wouldn’t even be a question of staying if it wasn’t complicated.

So many people, once they find out that I’m divorced, pull me into a corner to ask, “How did you know it was the right thing?” And I think this question is universal: How did you know that was the right school to choose? How did you know that was the right house to buy? The truth is you never truly know, and so I think the bigger question is: How do we exist as humans without knowing?

A few weekends ago, I went away with my kids to a friend’s little beach condo in Ocean City, Maryland, which I’d never been to. And the whole time I was really grumpy because we left late and missed the sunset, and I was like, “The whole point was the sunset!” And then my anxiety woke me up at 5:00 the next morning and I looked outside and saw the horizon just starting to pinken as the sun rose. I ran out to the beach and watched that five minutes of perfection, and afterwards I just felt dumbstruck that this happens every day. It will happen whether I make the right decision or the wrong decision, whether I’m alive tomorrow or not, whether you finish the book or you don’t. I think this is at the heart of why I draw so much comfort from the landscape, especially in the country. It reminds me that we can let go a little bit because we’re actually not at all in control.

NGL: I haven’t personally read many memoirs about separation or divorce, and I was happy to have this beautiful window into what this experience was like for one person. You write, “The pain of divorce is really the pain of grief. You grieve for the death of the fantasy you believed, you hoped for, the one you so desperately wanted to be true.” There’s something so universal about the feeling you describe here, whether you’re somebody who has been through a divorce or not. Was it a goal of yours to explore, not just the ending of one woman’s marriage, but endings in a larger sense?

KM: It was. I was hoping to create a new catalog of the experience of leaving. And the reason I wanted the active verb of “leaving” in the title is that it will never end. When people say, “Oh, you’re divorced,” I think they want some kind of finality to it, and it just doesn’t exist. What I really hoped to encapsulate is that long arc of leaving. I will be leaving my marriage for my entire life because it’s not really him I’m leaving, but who I thought I could be. I’m grieving a version of myself that I believed in.

“I was hoping to create a new catalog of the experience of leaving.” –Kelly McMasters

NGL: The Leaving Season begins when you’re in your post-college years, continues through your years of marriage, and ends when you’re a newly divorced mother of two elementary school-aged children. Was hard for you to capture your earlier feelings about your ex-husband without them being colored by your later feelings? How did you handle this shift as a memoirist?

KM: This book is a divorce book, but every divorce begins as a love story. I remember turning in the manuscript and waiting for my editor’s call. When we spoke, she said to me, “It’s going well. You’re maybe 70% there.” I was like, “What? I thought I was totally done!” But what she said was, “You need to remember why you married him and let us feel that.”

And so I returned to rebuilding certain scenes—when my husband and I first met, or the first time he painted me—and doing so allowed me to bring more compassion to the page in the later chapters. If I hadn’t loved him—if he wasn’t his own, in many ways magical, creature—leaving would’ve been very easy. There wouldn’t have been a book to write because there would be no conflict. In the end, I wanted to honor the truth in that.

NGL: In your essay “The Stone Boat,” you recall discovering that your ex-husband had painted, and then shared on social media, a nude portrait of your two sons—a decision that ultimately led to a Child Protective Services investigation. Your rage and sadness in the aftermath of this discovery are palpable. But I think what makes this piece doubly powerful is how, even as you judge your ex-husband, you interrogate the ethics of weaving your children into your writing. You ask, “Am I not simply painting my own portrait as I write these words? Am I not unearthing this horrible moment in our personal history?” There’s so much humility in this self-reflection, and I think this is a question so many parents who are memoirists grapple with. Have you developed a personal philosophy of how to write ethically about one’s children? Because I haven’t! I struggle with this over and over.

KM: I wish I had a short “Yes, this is how I do it,” answer to this. But it changes all the time, even within each essay and then even line to line. I do feel strongly that my first duty is always to protect my children, as a mother and as a writer. But I was really relieved a few weeks ago, when I went to see Maggie Smith read. Somebody asked her how she squares writing about her children, and she said, “I spend so much more time parenting than I do writing.” I think what she was getting at is that in order to tell our truths as mothers who write—or writers who mother, whichever way you identify—it’s really hard to extricate one from the other. It’s not like I sit down at my desk and think, ‘Okay, I’m a writer now. Lock the mother out of the room.’ Not everything I write is about my family, but it’s where my life is centered right now. It’s the filter that everything processes through.

What’s most important to me is to remember that they’re their own characters. They’re not part of me. This is a hard mindset to break because they once were part of me. But my whole goal as a parent personally is to make sure that I don’t pretend that they still are, and I think the same goes on the page. In certain revisions, I would circle things that felt off, and I noticed that my discomfort would grow when I started treading into territory where I inhabited something other than observation about my children, assuming, Oh, they must have been thinking or feeling this . It’s very important to me to always leave space for their own experience and their own memories.

NGL: I wouldn’t call The Leaving Season an overtly feminist anthem, and yet it absolutely illuminates the challenges of being female in a patriarchal world. I’m thinking in particular of your essay “The Cow,” where you describe becoming a sort of adoptive mother to a baby cow at a local barn, owned and run by men. Your relationship to this cow becomes a way of reckoning with being a woman in the deeply masculine guns-and-hunting atmosphere of a rural farm community. What did this hyper-masculine space teach you, if anything, about your own womanhood, especially in the context of a heterosexual marriage?

KM: There are many instances in the book where I think I know something, and then I’m shown a parallel image that helps me understand my feelings a different way. With “The Cow”—and this is why I love nonfiction—the barn literally did name this cow “Kelly,” so she’s essentially me in cow form. I wanted that experience of raising her so much—of becoming a cow mama and fulfilling this dream—and it was only through understanding how people do or don’t value their livestock that I then was able to look at the barn, at this social experiment, and realize ‘Oh hey, wait a minute, this translates.’ Whereas before, I’d thought, “Well, I’m just misunderstood,’ I realized, ‘No, I’m the one that’s misunderstanding. Everyone else is pretty clear on how they feel!’ But I couldn’t see this until I had the right prism to refract it.

NGL: On the flip side, your book definitely illuminates the power of women coming together in community. It’s when you begin to make connections with other women in your rural neighborhood, or welcome other women for conversation in the local bookstore you eventually open, that you begin to see the fractures in your marriage more clearly and gather the strength to leave it. It occurred to me that both the anthologies you’ve co-edited, This Is the Place: Women Writing about Home and Wanting: Women Writing About Desire , are their own sort of havens for female communion and community. Could you tell me about the place of female comradeship in your personal and creative life?

KM: The experience of co-editing This Is the Place was transformative. At the time, I was so isolated. It was just me and my sons, in our first year of living on Long Island. Reading through the pile of pages on my desk, I really did feel that I had this chorus of women talking to me about the complications of home in their own lives. It’s so vulnerable to send someone a draft, and it was amazing to talk these essays through and then see each writer wrestle them into something more beautiful. Being part of that process was its own communion and the only thing that then gave me the strength and courage to come to the page myself.

I knew when I found this Joy Harjo line that I needed to include it in the book: “With our pack of memories/ Slung slack on our backs/ We venture into the circle….” It reminds me of the power of women when we’re together telling our stories, sharing our secrets, being vulnerable and protecting each other. This is something that has sustained me over and over and over again in so many ways. It’s always been women who have saved me.

Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters . Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review , The Sun , Gettysburg Review , Creative Nonfiction , Fourth Genre , River Teeth , The Washington Post , and The Boston Globe , among other publications. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has been shortlisted several times for The Best American Essays .

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the leaving season: a memoir in essays.

• About the Book

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-30s 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 heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating 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.

The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays by Kelly McMasters

• Publication Date: May 9, 2023
• Genres: Essays , Memoir , Nonfiction
• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• ISBN-10: 0393541053
• ISBN-13: 9780393541052