The Leap Years: Women Reflect on Change, Loss and Love

by Mary Anne Maier, Mary Anne Maier (Editor)

Women Reflect on Change, Loss, and Love

Twenty-nine women write of the experiences that have transformed their lives. Essays by Diane Ackerman, Margaret Atwood, Diane Glancy, Joan Halperin, Maxine Kumin, Madeleine L'Engle, Gloria Wade-Gayles, and more appear alongside pieces by exciting upand-coming writers. From Beth Kephart's reassessment of her relationship with the world after a near-death experience to Joan Arcari's humorous account of her double life as career girl/mother, each voice illuminates a time and place familiar to us all.

234 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 1999

Reviews

[René · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think this anthology came together that well. Not all the stories fit in well with their assigned themes. It also could've done with more diversity in terms of backgrounds of the authors. And writing style. Too many of these women sounded the same. While I expect many women to have similar experiences (especially if the women all come from a particular part of the world and age group), I think their voices should still have some distinction from each other, and it seems the editors of this anthology didn't do a good enough job harvesting writers with distinctive voices. It's heavy on white women with academic backgrounds. Still there were some standouts. The stories I liked best were the ones by Rhonda Poynter, Madeleine L'Engle, Barbara Brent Brower (her dad was the owner of Stuart Brent Books in downtown Chicago, who was a jerk to her), Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Gloria Wade-Gayles, and Margaret Atwood. Julie Moulds Rybicki's story on her cancer is especially memorable as well.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sorry I gave this book away. I want it back.

[Chloe Current · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this collection to be one of my favorites, and perfect for women in a point in their lives for reflection. When I first picked this up, I was twenty, and in a state of confusion as to what kind of woman I am. It was refreshing to read stories that were so authentic to reality, as I find that many of the 21 century books, movies, shows, and media platforms do a horrendous job at portraying the lived experience of women. This however, feels comforting and genuine. My favorite story in this is by Patricia Cumbie. It is about about a woman who is developing feelings for a young co worker of hers.

"The things you notice about prospective lovers: his voice, smell, the hands. There's a cello sound to his voice; low, strong, no dramatic pitch."

This book is a hard one to find, I believe it is out of print, however, it is on a lot of used books sites.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book twenty years ago and read it then and loved it. I am glad that I hung onto it though because it has much more significance now than it did then because much of it's subject matter is about being a middle-age woman. As my friends and I are finding, not much is said about being a woman in middle age, we do not talk much about the changes in our bodies and in our relationships as we grow older and yet here is a collection of women's voices who do talk about these things. This collection of essays also shows us why we need to talk about this period of a woman's life because too often women seem to become invisible once they become post-menopausal. This is a book that I want to buy and pass out to all of my women friends in their forties, fifties and sixties so that we learn to celebrate who we are in this time.