"Grief Cottage"

Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including Violet Clay, Father Melancholy's Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband and Evenings at Five. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer, her journal in two volumes (ed. Rob Neufeld). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Godwin applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Grief Cottage, and reported the following:

Peculiarly fortuitous in the case of Grief Cottage. Because midway down this page the balance of who's taking care of whom shifts. Aunt Charlotte has fallen down drunk and broken her wrist and the Rescue Squad is carrying her out the door on a stretcher. Marcus thinks, "She was dying to go somewhere without me--even if it was only to the hospital in an ambulance." Then he goes out on the oceanside porch and considers the ghost he had seen earlier today. ("I wished he could be here with me, but probably he could only stay where he was. A further idea arose: if a dead person could make himself known to a living person, then why wouldn't the reverse apply?") Marcus decides to try to send an emanation of himself north to Grief Cottage to keep company with the ghost.

Visit Gail Godwin's website.

My Book, The Movie: Grief Cottage.

--Marshal Zeringue