Alexandra Grabbe's Blog

I’m really pleased with the bookmarks my daughter created for my memoir SEEING JOY, which Koehler Books will publish mid-March. Publishing a book takes a lot of energy, time, and dedication. A friend wrote this week,” It really surprised me to see the effort you do to promote your books. It’s seems like a full time job.” This is what most people do not realize. How complicated and time-consuming it is to publish and promote a book. In any case, I’ve got my bookmarks, and, as you can see, they are gorgeous! SEEING JOY is available for preorder. Reserve your copy today!

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Five more days until my trip to Sweden! I’m staying two weeks this time, way up north again near the Arctic Circle. Before leaving, I went to Porter Square Books in Cambridge to pick up reading material for the trip. Guess who was near the entrance, greeting guests!

The post Off to Sweden Soon first appeared on Alexandra Grabbe.

Late November and early December have been extremely busy. I proofread SEEING JOY three times. Koehler Books held a cover poll. And the winner was …. the portrait of my mom, painted by a Russian émigré artist in Manhattan in the thirties, with gorgeous stars that really pop out in a lovely way.  You can click over to BOOKS on this website for a look at the result. SEEING JOY is now available for preorder from Amazon, so that is where anyone interested in helping me out should go. I also have been preparing for my trip to Sweden. I’m off to see Sven on Christmas evening. It will be a new experience because I have never visited Sweden in winter. We are talking about a trip to the Arctic Circle here, so think cold, dark, snowy, and often battered by the north wind. But I’m all geared up for the challenge! 

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Winter is coming early, with snow predicted this week, up to six inches, so it’s time to share a final photo from Fall 2025. The year ends with dismal stats on books. Print book sales are down 0.6% through October 2025 with 3.3 million fewer books sold than in the same period in 2024 according to Circana Bookscan. Adult fiction is declining for the first time in five years. 80% of published books do not sell 100 copies and only 6% sell 1000 copies. So, selling books becomes a Sisyphean endeavor, which I plan to undertake again in 2026 for my memoir SEEING JOY. Apparently, teens spend their free time on social media, and their attention span seems to have atrophied. What a shame! It is such a pleasure to sit down with a good book. I tend to read several at once. My favorite right now is The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow. I love the prose style so much that I don’t want it to end! 

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Yesterday the Arlington Author Salon held its annual book fair. We welcomed 19 local authors who sold books published in 2025 or 2024. The energy at the Roasted Granola Café was amazing. Everyone seemed to have fun, from the authors to the customers to the Roasted Granola owners, who circulated to speak with all the authors. I organized the event with my friend Yelena Lembersky and left afterwards feeling pleased and exhausted, cradling four new books including Lake Song by Lesley Bannatyne, Last Night at the Disco by Lisa Borders, If You Must Go I Wish You Triplets by Virginia DeLuca, and Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations, a book of poetry which won a Massachusetts book award. I don’t think people realize how hard it is to succeed as an author. Recent statistics reveal that 80% of published books do not sell 100 copies. Only 6% sell 1000 copies. Print book sales are down 0.6% through October with 3.3 million fewer books sold than in the same period in 2024 according to Circana BookScan. Yikes! 

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Bostonians are fortunate to have an excellent hospital like Mass General! Here’s the view from the ninth floor. You can see the golden dome of the Statehouse near the top. When I was seated in the waiting room at the Avon Center this morning, I looked around at the other patients, waiting just like me. I asked myself, these young women, dressed in blue half-johnnies over jeans and scrolling through their phones … what do we have in common? Well, we are part of the one in eight American women to have developed breast cancer. No one knows why the rate is so high, but I have an idea. Toxic chemicals in the environment must play a role. I had my annual mammogram and saw my oncologist and hightailed it out of there. But am I ever grateful that my lumpectomy last December went so well and that there’s no sign of a recurrence …

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How beautiful autumn can be! I love this season with its abundance of color. When I fly back from Sweden and the plane descends, I look down at the suburbs of Boston and feel a special joy that my country exists. Perhaps the depth of my pride relates to the fact that my father came here in 1923 as an immigrant. He had to leave Russia as a teenager. His favorite uncle was stoned to death by a revolutionary mob in St. Petersburg. Growing up in the United States, I had no such experience. This type of trauma only figured in history books and novels as something to read about. Now we have a president bent on deporting immigrants and slashing away at our government. Thanks to our television sets, we were all able to witness what happened on Feb. 24, 2022. We saw the tanks heading for Kyiv. We heard the reports of how the invaders raped the women in Bucha and murdered civilians. Now, drones and missiles are killing brave Ukrainians. Anyone with any sense knows that Putin is a war criminal. His soldiers starve, torture, and murder POWs. He’s against democracy. Our longtime allies in Europe fear Putin might send his troops to invade their countries if he is allowed to win in Ukraine, a sovereign nation. And our president admires dictators like Vladimir Putin. Trump is behaving like a dictator himself. With the destruction of the East Wing, I decided to write to Justice Roberts. His court is partially responsible for the president’s belief that he can do whatever he pleases. You should too. Democracy is at stake.

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I’ve been home from Sweden for two weeks. Here’s a photo of one of my favorite buildings up in Lulea, a small city 100 miles from the Arctic Circle, where I was staying. Most Americans do not realize how long Sweden is. To fly to Lulea from Stockholm, which is close to the middle, it takes an hour and a half. If you superimposed Sweden on a map of North America, the country would go from Toronto, Canada, to Tallahassee. Now it’s time to prepare for the Arlington Author Salon Book Fair on November 8 and to review edits to my manuscript SEEING JOY. I’m feeling sad about my husband’s having had a stroke, so I have not been doing much new writing of late, but I did want to check in here and thank you for reading.

The post Back in the USA first appeared on Alexandra Grabbe.

I have been in Sweden for three weeks, visiting my stroke-victim husband, so rather than describe daily life here, I thought I’d share an amazing photo. There’s a new profession that involves reconstructing the face of someone who has died. In the case of this woman, she lived centuries ago and took part in the ill-fated voyage of the Vasa, the ship that capsized on August 10, 1628 in Stockholm harbor. She looks like an actress decked out in period garb and feels almost like she might answer if we spoke to her, impertinently perhaps. The Vasa sank on its maiden voyage. The ship can now be visited. It is located at the Vasa Museum, which has become a popular tourist attraction in Stockholm.  

The post Back from the Dead … first appeared on Alexandra Grabbe.

Over the next month, I will read Allegra Goodman’s Isola, Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, and Weina Ramsel’s The Master Jeweler. All three authors live in Massachusetts, as does Geraldine Brooks. I so admired her memoir that I wrote copy for the Arlington Council on Aging library. Check it out:

Memorial Days is a memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, a former journalist born in Australia who switched to writing fiction in 2001. She was deep in the manuscript for her sixth novel when the phone rang, and she learned that her husband Tony Horowitz had suffered a sudden heart attack at 60 and died. It was Memorial Day, 2019. In writing this fragile but beautiful memoir, she created not only a tribute to Tony but also an unassuming self-help guide for recovery from grief, or at least a better understanding of the pain that losing someone you love can create. She doesn’t suggest how to cope with such loss, but readers come away with information on what worked for her. Chapters alternate between two locations: Martha’s Vineyard, where the couple lived with their two children, and Flinders Island, where she sought refuge and learned to accept that her clever, witty husband was gone forever. 

            Flinders Island is located between Australia and Tasmania. The three-room shack Geraldine chose as her base doesn’t sound like the ideal Airbnb rental, with its woodstove for cooking and an outhouse rather than a modern bathroom. She discovered the island with Tony while scouting for a novel she never wrote and didn’t return until February 2023. She goes to Flinders Island seeking “the right to grieve. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss.” In this remote place, she sets out both to honor her husband’s memory and to care for herself. “This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal and that I am okay. Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not okay.”

            I had read Time of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, so when I brought Memorial Days home from the library, I knew I would enjoy the book because of Brooks’ writing style. I did not expect to feel warm and fuzzy at reading about loss. Such is the magic of this book. The memoir had a calming effect as I followed Brooks’ wanderings along barren beaches. Her observations comforted me in a weird way as she picked up shells and examined bits of granite or watched birds. She managed to get through what must be one of the most difficult experiences in life and to write eloquently about it, and that, in itself, represents a victory. 

I also appreciated her sharing of “the obstacle course of legally ending a life” related in the Martha’s Vineyard chapters, and her use of words. Like for instance in the description of caring for her elderly mother, she refers to the “thievery of Alzheimer’s,” which is what the disease must feel like to some caregivers: a loved one has been stolen away. 

In the last chapter, Brooks shares what she gained by spending so much time alone. The acceptance that her life will never be the same without Tony, but also a decision to make each moment count, starting with appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us in nature. 

Finally, she advises any readers who have also suffered the loss of a spouse to allow themselves to express the emotion that grief brings, rather than holding it in, to tell the story either to a therapist or a friend, to write it down. “Write the truest thing you know,” said Hemingway. This is what Geraldine Brooks does with Memorial Days. 

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