The Leaving Season: A Memoir

by Kelly McMasters

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 midthirties living her 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. 19 black-and-white drawings

Genres: Memoir

320 pages, Paperback

Published May 28, 2024

About the author

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She 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 Washington Post Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Tin House, Newsday, Time Out New York, Columbia Magazine, and MrBellersNeighborhood.com, 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.

Reviews

[Callie Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

leaving, creating, and finding home.

[L]

I have been reading a lot of "divorce books" lately. You know why. Half this book isn't a divorce book. You will get to that in the second half. There are some chapters that felt rushed or squeezed in just to connect the themes. I am a creative and she is a creative so I can relate to that part of her journey.

[Anna Giallo · Rating 4 out of 5]

So well written. Easy to read. A gracious account of her life with marriage, motherhood and self preservation beautifully accounted for. I had the privilege of meeting her at a book reading and it was really a great experience. This was a lovely book to read.

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

started out as a 4, slid to a 3 half way through it. It is a memoir of short stories that should be read 1 at a time as it does not flow easily.