As in Doris Grumbach's widely praised day book,
Coming into the End Zone
,
Extra Innings
offers an immense, sometimes funny, sometimes tart, and sometimes very moving account of a closely examined life.
It records an eventful and quotidian year crowded with literary pleasures and pains, the natural beauties and social particulars of life in coastal Maine, the mingled joys and affronts of travel to New York, Washington, Mexico, and the looming presence of illness and mortality. It is, finally, a book about the successful search for home and for inward peace.