The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays

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 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.

Genres: Memoir, Essays, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Biography, Marriage

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 9, 2023

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

[Danielle | Dogmombookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book make me reflect on how much people are changed by the environment they find themselves in - between city folk and country folk, whom they're dating, what job they hold, the main roles they see themselves taking (caretaker, wife, teacher, etc). It seems quite trite but true nonetheless, when we strip these things away what are we but our thoughts and feelings, mostly influenced by our current surroundings? If further stripped of family and friends, the surroundings can envelop you and isolation become deafening.

But conversely, it's amazing how truly adaptable people are, grafting pieces of themselves on top of older, sensitive parts, pushing up new buds, tentative but resilient.

These were very thoughtful essays that she's had time to think and reflect on for many years. She weaves through the telling and the reflection very deftly, interrogating past feelings and emotions with grace and honesty.

[Nicole Graev · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I made my way through Kelly McMasters’ memoir in essays, The Leaving Season, (W.W. Norton, 2023), savoring every page, I was reminded that the richest and truest literature often defies easy classification, illuminating what it means to be human with a nuance impossible to reduce to a single sound bite.

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.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her exquisite collection, Kelly McMasters explores leaving in all its myriad forms, the ways we leave and the ways we're left, with deep insight and grace. Her story is unique, yet I caught glimpses our myself and my life on these pages, felt stirred and shaken by the emotions these beautiful words evoked. I'll be sitting with these feelings, lingering over these words, for a long while. Thank you #NetGalley and WW Norton for allowing me the opportunity to read an early copy of #TheLeavingSeason.

[cass krug · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 ⭐️

the leaving season is a memoir in essays dealing with marriage, motherhood, moving, and owning a bookstore. mcmasters takes us from the beginning of her relationship with an artist in new york, through the course of their marriage, her husband's subsequent health problems, and the birth of their two children. they have a stint in rural pennsylvania, where they open a bookshop and where their marriage ends up falling apart. the end of the book deals with kelly’s experiences as a single parent trying to find a steady job and a place in the world for her and her children.

this had all the makings of a book i should love, but i just didn’t connect with the writing in this one as much as i thought i would. some of my favorite books of this kind have me heavily relating to and underlining certain passages and i didn’t have that urge very often here. i would love to hear more about her experience as a bookseller though, even though it was only for a short time.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stark, honest, and brutal. It must have taken a lot of courage to write so candidly about a marriage gone so wrong. After all, as McMasters mentions, it's your own decision who you marry. So when the marriage implodes, does that mean that you can't trust your own judgment?

Every essay flows like poetry. Despite the sometimes dryness of the subject matter (since stories of marriage inevitably include accounts of the rote day-to-day), I never felt bored.

This is a great read for anybody that gets a kick out of examining relationships. Or, if you're the type to stare at car wrecks, then this might scratch that itch as well.

[Jennifer Coles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was ok. I kept reading because one of the characters was an artist so I liked reading about his work.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

This felt like more essay and less memoir, even though the author does refer to her marriage and divorce. The essays seemed far less personal than most memoirs, but she does have interesting things to say about various phenomena. It was more of a gentle read than a compelling one. I was a little confused about her calling her children "The Little Mormons," after writing that they asked her not to dance in the front seat. Does she believe Mormons don't believe in dancing? That comment might have made sense if they asked her not to hang out at the bar, drink alcohol, smoke, or swear at them, but the dancing comment didn't make sense, unless she's confusing Mormons with other religious groups - which was just kind of annoying, since most people don't have accurate views about Mormons and get most of their education from the Book of Mormon Musical or inaccurate tv shows, or confuse them entirely with excommunicated, unaffiliated polygamous groups. For a professor who I'm assuming values scholarly accuracy, that was off (although admittedly most readers who don't know any more than she does won't care).

[kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kelly McMasters writing is elegant and breathtaking. I absolutely adored these stories about her move to rural Pennsylvania, the opening of her own bookstore and, eventually, the dissolution of her marriage. Interwoven in these stories are love, companionship (in the form of loving small town neighbors and a freemartin cow), grief, heartbreak, joy, desire and so much more. These essays are absolutely exquisite and mesmerizing. One of my favorites of the year.

[Alison FP · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about divorce sounds really uplifting, right? The happiness and the pain are both ibeautifully described. As someone who has been through this, it wasn’t that difficult to feel all the feels. I honestly thought the book was going to be a bit of an eat pray love situation where she ran off and tried to find happiness. But the leaving is just talking about leaving the marriage. She stays with her two boys and tries to make the best life she can for them while dealing with the insurmountable amout of stress and guilt and failure that comes with the ending of a marriage, including debilitating bodily manifestations. All written in beautiful prose. Sometimes memoirs are far more powerful than fantasy invented in somebody’s head.

[Nat Rad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed Kelly’s honest reflection and narrative of her experiences starting her career, navigating relationships, being an artists wife, being a friend, starting a family, being a business owner, moving out of the city, making ends meet , being a mother, ending relationships, and most of all being human.

[Sherrie Howey · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a memoir consisting of short essays,the author details the start of a new relationship leading to marriage through the unraveling of this relationship, leading to divorce. As a single mother of 2 children, she navigates many challenges and is totally honest about her feelings and the difficulties she faced.
At times, this book was heart wrenching ( particularly her experience on 9/11 and her experience with CPS) , yet her determination and resolve carried her through these horrible situations. Filled with vulnerability and raw emotion, kudos to the author for such a beautifully written book.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Enchanted Prose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why one woman’s selfhood journey resonates (New York City and Long Island, New York & rural northeastern Pennsylvania; 2001 to present day): Searing and soaring, Kelly McMasters’ memoir-in-essays that span and shift over twenty years emotionally affects us differently than traditional memoirs.

“A truly successful essay collection can reveal the author processing experiences at many different points in time and through many different lenses . . . the distance afforded by some multivalent lenses can allow an author to regard one’s younger self as a different character, a different persona. This can create an unease or uncertainly that is exciting, and also very relatable to the reader.”

Elizabeth Kadetsky, “The Memoir in Essays: A Reading List,” Lit Hub, April 29, 2020

Nineteen essays, each stunning, building on each other. Personal, with an honesty that must have been emotionally exhausting to dredge up and make sense of. Influenced by historical events, cultural discord, and a philosophy of appreciating the good not solely the bad. More of a coming-to-terms with the way things must be, but not until tirelessly trying to change the trajectory. The tone is melancholy, sorrowful, poignant, nostalgic, at times wondrous, but not bitterness. “There’s romance inherent in loss and nostalgia,” McMasters graciously says.

Calling The Leaving Season a memoir-in-essays versus a memoir magnifies the push-and-pull tension of a contemplative journey of self-discovery, even if aspects are unlike ours. Navigating different stages of life – coming-of-age, career, motherhood, divorce, single parenting – resonate. When to make a life-changing decision to leave a place, job, city, marriage? What’s gained and lost? Reflections that give voice to the choices, juggling, and struggles women face, exploring what it means to be a woman true to herself, needs, family?

The opening line of, “Home Fires,” the first essay, sets the stage with one of McMasters’ two sons asking: “WHAT SHOULD WE SAVE, MAMA?” The profound question isn’t just what would you take if you had to flee a fire, but an existential one. What should you pay close attention to that matters most to you?

The prose is emblematic of someone who’s dwelled in the world of books and words. As an only child, McMasters found solace and pleasure in the library near her Long Island home. Contributor to a delightful, eclectic array of magazines – literary, tech-related, pop culture, children’s – she’s been teaching words as an English professor at Columbia University and elsewhere; today at Hofstra University, circling back to her home roots.

Home as a physical place, geographical/environmental landscape, and deeper psychologically isn’t something just thought about in these essays. In 2017, the author co-edited the essay collection, “This is the Place: women writing about home.” She’s also written the 2008 award-winning, “Welcome to Shirley: a memoir from an atomic town,” about her hometown near Brookhaven National Labs, adapted into a documentary.

The Leaving Season is predicated on a dream that may not have “ever truly existed in the first place.” We sense the handwriting on the wall before McMasters, perceiving leaving as failure, tugging at our heartstrings because she tried so very hard to make the dream of a place and a marriage work out.

Opening in Manhattan 2001 when McMasters found herself standing outside the World Trade Center watching the twin towers burst into flames, staring in disbelief at people jumping out of the windows of burning skyscrapers. “Home Fires” summons up a “spectacularly dramatic catastrophe” and then, in the next breath, linked to the emotional catastrophe of a ten-year relationship, six married, with a “moody” artist anonymously named R. ending in divorce. “Marriage, after all, is just one long exercise in controlled burning,” she concludes.

McMasters didn’t leave New York City after 9/11. She did after 2006, when the USS Intrepid got stuck in the Hudson River leaving for its new home and identity: the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. Metaphorically, that’s when it hits her that the “girl I once was still stuck.” She’s twenty-five. In “Intrepid,” the second essay, she assesses: “Sometimes, staying docked seems the safer option. But everything in New York moves on eventually.”

Before the moving, leaving, a few essays are interjected about her backstory with R. Unsure of herself, she was drawn to his “certainty” and differentness. “Invigorating, or terrifying,” but emotionally draining more than anything else. Pained when the impressionistic portrait painter refuses to paint her picture, and yet, fantasizing of not only having a room of one’s own but a home, alone, like Georgia O’Keefe. (Marriage wasn’t in her plans, nor motherhood.) Later in the “Stone Boat,” R.’s artistry is characterized as “exaggerated expressionism” with an “obsession with color and pattern.”

R. had been successful in the avant-garde center of the art world, but a rude awakening awaits when the couple move from Brooklyn to an isolated (on ten acres) “1860s eyebrow colonial farmhouse” in a rural “area with more cows than people.” Three hours from Manhattan, yet worlds away. “Part of the allure is to be a different person yourself.” But how far are you willing to go?

This was a place of “savagery and beauty,” where the “normal rules of society did not apply.” Driven by hunting seasons, broken men “powerless became the powerful.” For a while, McMasters gets lost in sharing the “wonders” of Nature, harkening Rachel Carlson, with her two young boys. When she looks back now she sees herself “separate from the person I know myself to be out in the rest of the world.”

Playing psychologist, we see a marriage likely doomed from the start due to a string of bad luck compounding on itself. R. had his first heart attack at thirty-nine right before they married; his second right before they moved into the farmhouse. Was he suffering from clinical depression gone untreated? How much of his disinterest was affected by his medical condition? Anger ignored before they left New York City? How much was he affected by the “feral quality” of a place not even on a map that unfolds in the essays, “The Cow,” “The Ghosts in the Hills,” and “Lessons from a Starry Night”?

How much pain could have been prevented had they focused on thoroughly vetting the stone farmhouse in need of tremendous repair and renovation, R. could no longer do? McMasters assumed, no griping, all the mounting bills, balancing several literary jobs at time including commuting to Manhattan. Mounting too was her anguish of a father disengaged in co-parenting, fatherhood. Intensified in the essay that gives the collection its name, “The Leaving Season.” But, she persists. For the sake of her children, not for herself.

It’s not until the gorgeous essay, “Bookshop: A Love Story,” that McMasters does something for herself and her dream comes closest to reality. Bursting with joy, hope, and a bit of “much-needed magic,” she and R. opened a joint bookshop and art studio on the closest Main Street to where they lived in Honesdale:

“Ultimately, it’s this love of books that buoys me,” she wrote in a column she pitched for The Paris Review, “Notes from a Bookshop.” This is when she realizes how much of herself she’s lost. Sadly, the dream lasted only a year.

“Our Castle Year,” “Suspended Animation,” “Finding Home,” and “End Papers” amplify the leaving, progressing to a heartfelt belief “family doesn’t have just one meaning.”

The Leaving Season shows us there’s dignity and grace when your dreams don’t come true. “By taking away, I could be creating room for more.”

Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)

[Giulia Zzz · Rating 3 out of 5]

“This is how a marriage ends. Slowly, piece by piece, and then all at once.”

I generally liked the book, or at least it had many of the elements that I usually enjoy: a reckoning, well embedded in its landscape (here the bustle of New York and then the much different rural Pennsylvania life), a woman’s fight for her own path. But despite it being very raw, vulnerable, and observant, I missed the introspection. It was as if the author was a passive recipient of her life, and we never really got reflections on why she did certain things.

[Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even as the divorce rate in the United States is declining, the popularity of the divorce memoir remains undiminished, as evidenced by recent outstanding entries like Gina Frangello’s BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN and Maggie Smith’s YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL. To that pair, add Kelly McMasters’ lovely, painful THE LEAVING SEASON, an elegant essay collection that traces the decline and fall of her marriage and her first tentative steps on the path to a new life.

McMasters and the man she identifies only as “R.,” an artist who specializes in oil portraits and landscapes, met at a Brooklyn diner a few months before 9/11, when she worked 90-hour weeks as a corporate legal assistant at a large Manhattan law firm and planned to attend law school. Her job placed her close enough to the Twin Towers to give her a view of people leaping from the burning buildings --- “a perfect portrait of fire” --- as she describes in the haunting essay “Intrepid.” Those events, and her realization that “a suit is not armor,” persuaded her to abandon her original plan and instead pursue an MFA at Columbia University and a writing career.

As she describes in “‘His Wife Once Bit His Hand to the Bone,’” her attraction to R. was instantaneous, evoking a feeling that “everything was swallowed by his gaze.” And yet, almost from the beginning, one senses they were a poorly matched pair, as she explains her discomfort at his refusal to allow her to pose for him. She “wanted to be the one who inspired him,” while “I don’t paint girlfriends” was his excuse.

The central setting of McMasters’ story is an 1860s farmhouse on 10 acres of land in rural northeastern Pennsylvania that she and R. purchased while they still lived about three hours away from New York City and later moved to full-time. It’s the place where their two sons were born and the couple tried to make a life together until she realized that more trying was futile.

Their home, located in an area called Rock Lake that can’t be found on any map, provides the material for some of the collection’s best essays. In “The Cow,” McMasters introduces bachelor brother farmers Pat and Tom Joe, who jokingly name one of their herd after her (the animal turned out to be a “freemartin,” or hermaphrodite sterile female calf). That story nicely segues into “The Ghosts in the Hills,” where she recounts how the brothers’ barn served as a social gathering place, and features an account of a grisly murder-suicide and a startling explanation for why she decided one day never to set foot there again.

In “The Bookshop: A Love Story,” McMasters relates the quixotic decision to open a 250-square-foot bookstore on the dying main street of tiny Honesdale, Pennsylvania (pop. 4,458). She created a successful lecture series that brought well-known writers to the town, but R. abandoned his plan to start an artist’s print shop in the space and essentially turned his back on the project. He expected his wife would simply add her work at the bookstore to child care and her other jobs, including part-time teaching and freelance writing, while he focused on his painting, which only intermittently produced any meaningful income.

Eventually, the couple’s rural life became financially untenable, but as McMasters explains in her typically nuanced style, her relief at selling the ramshackle farmhouse after a dozen years was mingled with deep sadness as she left the place where she “felt closest to the possibility of finding happiness.” When she finally threw in the towel, she departed with the two boys for a one-year teaching assignment in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (“Our Castle Year”), and then on to another creative writing post on Long Island (“Finding Home”), where they remain today. McMasters isn’t interested in portraying R. as a villain, although her description in “The Stone Boat” of a painting he made of the boys is unnerving. But even as her determination to initiate the divorce is tinged with regret, she leaves little doubt where she believes the fault for the marriage’s failure lies (“Slowly, piece by piece, and then all at once”).

McMasters’ writing shares some of its DNA with the work of Leslie Jamison and Rebecca Solnit, who appears in “Finding Home.” She excels at apt metaphors, like the shrinking garden at the Pennsylvania home that becomes a symbol for the creeping demise of her marriage. In “Still Life 3: The Suburbs,” a description of the teeming contents of her car reflects both the loving disorder of her life and her resilience in the face of life’s obstacles. And as her marriage falters and fails, she wonders how R. “could study the human face for so long and not be able to see the one closest to him,” one of her aching epiphanies that at times grab the heart and at others stab it.

THE LEAVING SEASON is a candid, often wrenching account of a relationship’s slow, inexorable crumbling and a survivor’s attempt to climb from the ruin and build a new life. Kelly McMasters is a graceful, fluid writer, and though the subject matter of her memoir is anything but easy, the rewards of sharing her company on the page are undeniable.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

[Natalie Serber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed these essays. McMasters is a beautiful writer who brings to the page all the desire and yearning for love without losing oneself. I was deeply moved.

[Rupa Basu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished this exquisitely written memoir about ambitions, marriage, growing apart, motherhood, city vs country life and ultimately the act of leaving behind what's not working and making a fresh start. The author traces her early days of working as a legal assistant in NYC to her shift to rural Pennsylvania with her artist husband, having children, starting a bookshop, shutting it down, and ultimately leaving her marriage, moving out with two young sons, getting a tenured university job, making ends meet and later selling the beloved house in Pennsylvania. Initially it was like enjoyable, slice-of-life style short essays but gradually the narrative got very deep. The author dwells heavily on how, even in the absence of domestic violence or abuse, the insidious effects of feeling diminished as a person, having one's ambitions throttled, started slowly seeping in. The turning point came when her friend asked her, in the book shop, if she realised that she could leave her marriage if and when she wanted.

The memoir starts off with the work hard, party hard, don't overthink attitude of the young corporate slave (very resonant), moves on to the bohemian and exciting world of art and artists in NYC, then goes into the paradigm shift of life in a quiet rural neighborhood (which the author obviously adored) and ultimately the "leaving" - marriage, house, and the original dream of how life will turn out.

Thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful book.

[Christine Corrigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays by Kelly McMasters is a lyrical essay collection tracing the author's journey from a young woman in her first job as a paralegal in a corporate law firm to her early relationship with R., an artist, to their marriage, their building a family, and ultimately to the disintegration of their life together. Spanning fifteen years, the memoir traces the slow, painful unraveling of their relationship.

In a heart-wrenching discussion with her children, McMasters asks them if they understand what a divorce is and tells them that she and their father were getting a divorce. She asks them if they have any questions, and her younger child carefully says, "No." and the older child continues, "It's just . . . we thought you already were." Children see what adults don't, even when it's staring them in the face. Yet, despite the pain, McMaster is able to rebuild her life with her children, fulfilling, in a way, a medium's prediction that she would become a mother and will be a good one. "But it will take you a long time."

McMaster's writing is filled with grace and emotion, but not overwrought. While the subject matter of her memoir is hard, I enjoyed the journey with her on the page.

I received a complimentary ARC from W. Norton & Company, and all opinions expressed are my own.

[K2 ----- · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very powerful book about life's choices and making better ones going forward.

This book is so well written and the emotions are so well captured and never over dramatic.

Sadly the people who may benefit most from this book likely would not have time to read it but it was one I am glad I read and will stay in my heart.

McMaster is an intelligent woman who went to Vassar and took a job in New York City. Her life was profoundly bent by the events of 9-11 in ways others of us can hardly relate. She attributes her partnering up with a painter to her mental state after watching people drop from the WTC on 9.11 and certainly being young and impressionable. She and her partner, a portrait painter, move from their NYC life to the country in PA where they buy a large plot of land with a dream. They make many rooky mistakes, many others have made before them and more will make after. She realizes that her partner is not who she wants to continue to be with and leaves with her two young sons to begin a life with less volatility.

The book is just so well crafted. I was taken by her measured approach to writing about what must be been a very challenging time as a single mother supporting two children trying to better their lives and hers. Powerful and recommended.

[Emily Arnason Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this book for years, after meeting Kelly at a conference and joining her on panel discussion. I knew she was working on it. I'd read some of her shorter work online and loved her writing. So, I found myself happily glued to this memoir in essays, pulled into the story of love between a budding writer and painter in NYC. Following them to the country where they buy an old farmhouse to fix up and make friends with the quirky neighbors. I could feel the longing and hope for a certain life that ebbed and flowed through their early years together. I recognized the way nature and silence held the author, a buoy in the tumultuous sea of early motherhood, and all that she risked to try to keep her little family afloat. It's both a stunning memoir and one that comforts, like an old friend telling you a story over coffee that turns to lunch and then drinks and a walk in the park and look there's the moon --we're OK, we made it through.

[Jocelyn Jane Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kelly McMasters' memoir “The Leaving Season” is a master class in sensory details, creating crystal-clear settings, while also serving up a vivid emotional landscape. The book is a series of full-bodied essays which will appeal to essay readers, but it somehow also manages to read seamlessly like a straight-up memoir. It’s about a few different seasons of McMasters' life: meeting her artist husband, their move from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, having two boys, opening a book shop while juggling new motherhood and a shaky marriage, and her eventual decision to leave her husband, becoming a single mom in the suburbs. Each season here is so clearly and beautifully described. I highlighted many breathtaking sections. I love memoirs and this one provided that reading experience I crave: a regular person (ok, but brilliant writer) working through challenges to which many of us can relate.

[Kristin Martini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally, a memoir about a woman leaving her spouse that doesn't make me want to throw the book across the room! I loved the structure of this - telling the story via essays was a really smart choice, especially since the story itself took place over a long time, but only specific moments within that timeframe.

I also thought there was a lot of good introspection about Kelly's culpability in their marriage, and how she can take the lessons she learned (for good or for bad) and apply them to life after the marriage.

I particularly enjoyed how she hinted at the level of abuse without showcasing it. I got the picture and could fill in the blanks, and it really helped keep the focus on her and away from her ex (lord knows men like that do not need any more attention.)

Slight trigger warning that there is a CPS investigation due to inappropriate art of their two young sons that her ex put on social media. It's brief in mention, but worth noting.

[Zibby Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Leaving Season is about hope and renewal. It talks about how there are so many different types of leaving: leaving jobs, leaving places, leaving homes, leaving a self behind, and of course, leaving people. This is a collection of individual essays that can be read as one cohesive story. It is a collection of moments when the author thinks she should have left but didn't. The book takes place across three particular landscapes—we start in the city, move to the country, and end up in suburbia.

I liked how the author shows us how marriages can fall apart without speaking poorly of her husband. As a mom, she talks about focusing on her boys, her job, and rebuilding who she wanted to be. I loved a passage when the author wrote, "Was there a moment you knew you wanted to end your marriage? This is the question everyone always asks, the still-married ones, after one too many glasses of wine at the PTA fundraiser, at the ladies' lunch after chaperoning the first-grade aquarium trip, in the corner of the patio at the neighborhood Fourth of July party, alongside the dance floor at weddings. After a while, I came to understand that they were really asking about themselves, matching their experience with mine, pulling a measuring tape around my ribcage, and then circling their own to see how close the numbers fell."

To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this so much. Another book about a couple falling in love and then falling apart but I liked the author, a poet, very much and was fascinated by her relationship with her very self centered artist husband. I feel so proud of her and the other women in this little group of books I have read in a row with similar themes is their bravery and honesty. The shocking fact that her husband painted the portrait of their 2 little boys in such a harsh and unfeeling way is hard to get past as is the vivid imagery of him burning the painting in response to her reaction.
Would love to read a sequel to find out how everyone was doing but luckily I know there won’t be the tension and drama to support one

[Gracie X · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a well-written book by a talented author. Some of the essays didn't really move along the totality of the book, so I skimmed them. I both appreciated her candid honesty about her marriage and was disturbed by what she revealed. Male privilege and narcissism are so woven into too many marriages, and women are enculturated to accommodate both. I was so struck by her husband's disturbing behavior that played out with their children as well. We really need emotional education in High Schools on what a healthy relationship looks and feels like, and how to identify warning signs of trouble to come. As I read about her dating life with her future hubby, all I could think was: "Please don't marry this guy."

[Sandell Morse · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this moving memoir in essays, Kelly McMasters chronicles the slow dissolution of her marriage, the complexities of leaving, the difficulties of making a life for herself as single parent, of raising her children, of finding work, of making home after home, and of still loving the partner you left an leaving anyway in order to survive.

I loved McMasters insights into herself and loved following her growth. I was struck by this line: "Running away is different than leaving." A lesson I learned myself late in life.

And another. A friend asks McMasters if she knows she can leave. The friend needed to clarify, "Your marriage, I mean." McMasters writes: "Until that moment, I hadn't truly known it."

Tiny crystal moments McMasters captures beautifully.

[Barb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved this book, and I loved the voice of the narrator. Somehow, though, the book’s timeline, consistency, and cohesiveness felt off, leading to distrust of the narrator, like she’s making stuff up or omitting important parts. When did R. Move to NYC? Did he ever ask to move back in? So, even though you have no time for yourself and no money you are hiring babysitters and dating? What really happened with the guy from college (who some might call an emotional affair)? If you ARE Supermom, present and emotionally available with your kids, why do you feel the psychic nailed it when she said you WILL be a great mother someday? It felt like a very familiar story told by a friend I love despite how much she hurts me.

[Victoria Barret · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best books leave us slowing down half-way through, sensing the end and trying to prolong the story. "The Leaving Season" did this for me. Kelly McMasters' elegantly takes us through her own life periods -- the decisions she made that opened or closed others, city and country and finally suburban living, motherhood, and marriage and divorce. She weaves the themes of leaving and nostalgia throughout in a way that make her story accessible to a wide audience. It's a wonderful reflection on how a life evolves in time, what we can control and what we cannot, and when to say: It's time to move on, even when the moving on is bittersweet.

[Polly Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a particularly rare experience--the chronicling of a divorce, but the way in which McMasters writes it, finding metaphor in everyday occurrences renders this memoir an exquisitely etched portrait of the dissolution of a family that featured cracks before it began.

She falls in love with a painter in NYC and they move to a house in rural PA where the cracks begin to widen. All through it McMaster is painting her own portraits but through words. Her self honesty is blistering at times. I felt myself rooting for her the entire way, fascinated by what drew her to this artist and what she was looking for, hoping she would find it.

[Erica Gerard · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s impossible not to love this book. I listened to the audiobook, and the author does a wonderful job narrating her beautifully written, picturesque and perfectly detailed essays. It was easy to root for her through the joys and the sorrows of her story. Her vulnerability was the real champion here. I felt soothed by her personal revelations about the consequences of the choices we make and how little control we have over them. I’m blown away at the authors’ olympic-level ability to emotionally self-regulate during such a turbulent time in her life and make magic out of air. So smart. So capable. A true heroine.