And I Shall Have Some Peace There
by Margaret Roach
(Grand Central Publishing, 2011)
Honesty is inherently interesting and can be riveting when mixed with heart, soul, and delicious, literate writing. Margaret Roach's new book is all those things and more. Hers is a story of trading in one of the top jobs at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, with its stratospheric glamour, power, and attendant stress, for a solitary and sometimes deafeningly quiet life in upstate New York. Moving to her weekend home and refuge of twenty years with its old-house quirks and elaborate gardens, Margaret writes of actualizing her dream, while snakes, foxes, and too much snow all make a stab at unhinging her.
Many people fantasize about jumping out of corporate America and into a different lifestyle where time and choices are their own. But few do it, and those that do, rarely write about it with the candor and humor found in this book. Margaret faces the difficulty of transforming her identity and the challenge of inventing her days from scratch, with only a wayward cat and a pond full of frogs as witnesses. It is the unspoken irony of this book that the illusion of domestic perfection that defines the Martha Stewart brand is so at odds with how messy and wholly imperfect a real life is.
This book is about a quest for integrity, authenticity, and peace. It asks more questions than it answers, but there are lessons to heed. Instead of “shopping for serenity,” as she did in her old life, Margaret learns that by dropping out, she has also dropped in, way in, to my own interior landscape.” And fortunately for readers, that landscape is profoundly moving, funny, and irreverent.
Reviewed by Kerry Michaels