HOW TO LIVE

A collection of essays that traces the edges of past losses and dislocations, assembling guidance from years of wandering.

“For two years, I’ve been traveling to places I’ve never been before, where I know no one,” writes Groom, author of I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl. “Trying to understand what home is, where it is. For myself, who left Cape Cod as a child, traveling to a new state every few years, a new country in my teens…Is home the place you left, or the place you are now?" In 28 essays, many previously published in literary magazines, the author looks for ways to accommodate life's wounds—among them, a grandmother's death, a broken engagement, recovery from alcoholism, and the death of her infant son, 40 years earlier, who was being raised by her aunt and uncle in Boston at the time he succumbed to leukemia. The backstory is not forthcoming. In general, the author shies away from narrative storytelling and plot in favor of imagery, interiority, and a magpie approach to acquiring wisdom from various sources. For example, she writes about finding solace for her loss via a scientific study revealing that women carry within them the cells of their offspring for the rest of their lives. Each essay is subtitled with a place and a year, and Groom introduces many characters along the way. One of the most memorable is M, a Japanese student who faced extreme emotional difficulties, including deaths of loved ones and suicide attempts, and whom the author feels she failed—though it turns out the woman made it through tough times. M reappears in the final essay, "Call Yourself Alive," as Groom realizes, decades later, that M's approach has guided her all along: "Go to a new land. Learn to ask for what you need."

With her dreamy, lustrous writing, Groom invites readers to share her journeys across permeable boundaries.