Drinking the Rain [Mass Market Paperback]

If you've ever feared that the possibilities for excitement, adventure, wonderment, or simply change- shrink with age, you will be inspired by Shulman's resolve to continue searching for meaning and discovery in her life at fifty and well beyond. What courage to embark on a new and thoroughly independent life after decades of playing the role of wife and mother. But Shulman is not a super human. She does not possess some rarefied quality that we could not all find nestled in our spirit. We walk with her down the beach of her island past a barking and threatening dog. She has always held an irrational fear of dogs though never has she actually had a bad experience with one. Her instinct is to turn back, but instead she contemplates the nature of fear and how best to conquer it, and she decides the best thing is to face it. So she continues on, if somewhat cautiously.

This book will mark you, if you let it. I come away feeling better equipped to face my barking island dogs. I am more observant and appreciative of my surroundings. And I will never see myself as stuck in a single way of life, never let the light of change and possibility elude me.

Reading her memoir is like having a personal conversation with the author. Her tone is personal and intimate. When she stands back for a moment, picturing herself through a passing stranger's averted eye - a middle-aged lady in floppy hat and mismatched tennis shoes, gathering weeds in a basket - we too are startled and amused, having been looking from the inside out.

Shulman, recognized for her novels and feminism, reaches her cross-roads at age 50. Her children are grown, her relationship with her husband is a distant truce, the feminist movement has stalled, and her life is overfull of busyness.

But the birth of a new passion in her life is serendipitous. Always an adventurous cook, she finds her lengthy trips to the uninspiring island grocery a jarring intrusion on her pleasing solitude and a chore contrary to her new motto, "Do only what you like, nothing you don't!"

From years before she remembers mussel gathering, one of the few pleasures of the hurried vacations she had always hated. In those years, with small children and a domineering, orchestrating husband, the summer cabin, with no electicity or plumbing had meant a round of endless drudgery.

Now that she has only to please herself, mussel hunting is merely the first of her pleasures. Around her a world unfolds. Armed with Euell Gibbons and determination, she reaps the bounty of wild things, spending her days in exploration and discovery.

She finds in herself a new tranquility and simplicity which, as she feared, is invaded by New York's cosmopolitan pace and abundance. The reader is a bit ahead of her here, exhorting Shulman to enjoy what the city has to offer, just as she enjoys her island.

And when the author does absorb our advice (given to her by an old childhood friend at a party), she embraces it fully, applying this tactic to her whole life. Thus, when she accepts a position at the University of Colorado, she plunges into an exploration of New Age mysticism, health foods, mountain hiking and Buddhism. You don't have to share her interests to find her open-minded approach admirable.

There are upheavels too. Her children are less than thrilled in the back-to-nature changes in their New Yorker mother. Her husband shatters a summer's idyll at the island by sending divorce papers. And romantic love, with all its joy, threatens to disrupt her solitary self. As I said, you don't have to agree.

But through it all, Shulman struggles to maintain her equilibrium, making deliberate choices, letting her thoughts range free. She is enchanted by the wholeness of things - how all of nature interrelates - and then dismayed as pollution from the cities and radiation from Chernobyll threatens her island haven.

This is a memoir of continuous awakening and endless dialogue with the self and the world. There's helplessness, anger, hope and love and inspiration. It's a joy to read.