BOOKS ON GRIEF, LOVE AFTER 60, AND FRIENDSHIP.

My three books, quite different in content, still explore to one degree or another the issues of life and death. Death WHEN IT is close. Growing older, and friendship and endings. we all experience endings. It is the inevitable consequence of living.

Best Friends: I've followed this writer since I first discovered her remarkable memoir, "A Reluctant Life" and I've been well-rewarded. "Best Friends," too, is a kind of memoir, this one in the form of the actual 27-year correspondence (1961-1988) between two very individual women. Their letters are marvelous-- evocative, resonant; time travel back to not only Those Days but to "the way we were " --both bold and fragile, wise and perplexed, engaged in the moment, and eternally hopeful.  At one point in 1966, one of them writes presciently, "I sensed we were of our time. We would all move on in history eventually, some only as visitors but others will become heralds of our era." Prescient because their included such soon-to-be heralds as Sam Shepard, Dustin Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Shel Silverstein and Spaulding Gray. But don't construe that to mean this book is a name-drop. What it is--is an thoughtful, occasionally exuberant, occasionally wrenching story about friendship.

Clara at Sixty What a powerful writer. I am weeping again. In her first book, "A Reluctant Life," she broke my heart at the first page; in this one near the last. She shows us, in a real an visceral way, that love, compassion, and forgiveness are all that really matters. The well-drawn episodes, allow us to feel the palpable futility of looking outside ourselves. If I were to compare this book to: Eat, Pray, Love, I would only say this: Clara is true and authentic. No one understands what burning a life down to ashes feels like, until it happens. Clara's wisdom is earned through suffering.

A Reluctant Life: This is a moving beautifully written memoir. I felt similarities to Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking in its emotional impact; though, I give the nod to Nachmias-Baeu because it is much easier to read. Nachmias-Baeu invites the reader into her life as if she is having coffee with them. This informality allows the reader to be open to the, thoughtful, intense and rich life she describes.

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