Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place [Hardcover]

Okay, Susan Wittig Albert has done it to me. I live in a rented house with no yard on a busy street in the fourth largest city in the United States; and I just bought a fall tomato plant. I've learned that I need to move toward making this place--my place--my home. It's back to the land for me, even if it is only of few square feet of soil I don't own. That's merely part of what this memoir and meditation has done to me and for me. Albert's careful consideration of her marriage, her places, and herself, not using merely memory ("that notoriously unreliable beast") but a judicious culling from years of daily journals, is insightful and enjoyable. As a longtime reader of both Albert's fiction and nonfiction, I expected a lot; I was not disappointed.

More than twenty years ago, a somewhat battered RV rolled to a stop atop a hill just where the dry and arid land of west Texas stretches out leaving the more verdant landscapes to the east. This was a divide in the lives of the two passengers. In their midlives, Susan Wittig and Bill Albert were beginning a huge adventure launching a marriage and a joint writing career, while finding the place to create their new and shared home.

In the pages of Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, Albert offers her reader views and glimpses not only of the marriage, but of the places that became a part of the relationship and a part of her as an individual. She states clearly this is her "public self, the self I like to present to the world." While presenting this public self, she also skillfully recounts the unfolding of her life that bought her to this point.

Here is the story of the marriage from its beginning in 1987. Here are the questions they asked themselves parked on that hilltop. Where should they place this new shared life? Was it even going to work? "...we judged it an iffy proposition at best." Albert traces the conversion of five acres of lonely land owned by Bill Albert into Meadow Knoll, a working, loved home.

Albert brings her reader to the land, from its geography and geology to the people who knew it--whether passing through or calling it home--for the centuries before it became Meadow Knoll. She traces the transformation of "the" place into "their" place. Trees and buildings were no longer anonymous; they received names. Animals were born and crops planted. (Hence, my tomato plant!) This became the place they, both of them, belonged.

As their life together unfolded, Albert discovered yet another Susan, one who needed silence, to be alone, to be apart. This was not to leave the marriage, the place, the growing career, but to enhance. To develop this solitary person required not only introspection but another place. Here, Lebb Shomea, a silent retreat center in South Texas, enters the tale. Albert has found her place to be alone just as Meadow Knoll is her place of community, and, again, she uses the story of the land to enhance the telling of an odyssey of the spirit.

Many of us, for many reasons, are not as deeply attached to a place as Albert is both to Meadow Knoll and to Lebb Shomea, yet her descriptions, not only of these locations but of their importance in her life, certainly will make any reader pause to consider the places that have been and are critical to the living of her own life.

Both as a contemporary of Albert and as the survivor, explorer, and beneficiary of a long marriage (even longer than the Alberts') I read this book with a head often nodding in agreement and from time to time with eyes brimming with tears both from searing memories and laughter. Other long-time marriage veterans will readily identify with this memoir. But that is certainly not the only appeal. Those starting on the journey will find a useful roadmap, while those in mid-journey will find encouragement that much lies ahead.

Albert's many readers will be pleased and perhaps inspired by her account of her writing career. She shares its blossoming from a precarious beginning with writing-for-hire jobs to the full bloom of best sellers.

All readers should receive inspiration to dig out their own journals, sit, reflect, and then begin to record their own life experiences. Tomorrow, borrowing the excellent epigram of this book's prologue from Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, "As we discover, we remember, remembering we discover," I will dive into the closet, dig through the boxes of my own journals and begin my own discoveries.

by Patricia Nordyke Pando
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

This beautifully-written memoir by the multi-talented, Susan Wittig Albert is a wonderful meditation about what it means to live in the world. Her mature sensibility of "place" as more than just the location where you are takes the reader into various understandings of an individual's lived experience of history, contemplation, meditation, writing, silence, spirituality and choice.

She writes about the deliberate choices she made in mid-life, from college professor and administrator to full-time author and gardener. Her concern with the natural environment of where she lives in the Texas hill country--the plants, trees, waterways and fauna--seems to have deepened over time. She has a healthily fearful appreciation of the limits of what the earth can do, and give, and likewise has many insightful thoughts on the matter. The second half of the book was mostly about Albert's experiences of going to a "silence" retreat in a remote corner of southeast Texas (Kenedy County), which allows her to craft some beautiful set pieces on the natural history of the area. I had no idea there were nilgai running the plains of Kenedy County!

The other theme of the book is about understanding one's individuality; for example, her own place in a marriage, in doing work of her own. Albert's perspective on this seems to be influenced by certain Eastern philosophies and religions, but this is a neutral observation as she is not at all preachy or condescending, nor does she posit her own views as somehow superior to others.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for an enjoyable, informative read by an author whose sensibilities I appreciate more and more with every book.

Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place
Susan Wittig Albert is an acclaimed mystery writer who writes of her personal life with sensitivity and humor. She happens to be a friend of mine, but I would have been a lesser person but for buying her memoir. Writing about oneself is difficult and usually subjective. Our memories of time and place are colored also by our world view. And I'm sure Susan's memoir is thus affected. But it's a joy to read her. Susan is a personal friend to many, including me, who struggle to write their stories. Join me in praise of a wonderful woman.

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