Life Estates » (Reprint)

Shelby Hearon was born in 1931 in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and now makes her home in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of fifteen novels, including Footprints, Life Estates, and Owning Jolene, which won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. She has received an Ingram Merrill grant as well as fellowships for fiction from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award. She has served on the literature panels of both the Texas Commission on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Married to physiologist William Halpern, she is the mother of a grown daughter and son.

Sarah and Harriet have led parallel lives ever since they went to boarding school together. Now in their fifties, they are widowed within three months of each other. Sarah and Harriet gradually come to terms with each other, the men they buried and the life that continues to go on around them.

Publishers Weekly

It's always a pleasure to watch a writer mature, and in her 13th novel (after Hug Dancing ), Hearon offers plenty of satisfaction to the discriminating reader. Here she explores the mysteries and ironies of marriage, friendship, parentage and love with a frank, searching and compassionate eye. Friends since boarding school days, Sarah Rankin and Harriet Calhoun have lived synchronous lives in South Carolina and Texas: both married bankers, had two children and were widowed in their 50s, within a few months of each other. The way they deal with widowhood and, indeed, with their own mortality is the starting point of this engrossing novel. To Sarah, who never enjoyed the ``bondage'' of marriage and chafed over the societal biases against married women (the inability to get one's own credit card, etc.), it's a relief to live singly again. She runs a thriving custom wallpaper business, pursues a relationship with her late husband's physician. Though Harriet's marriage was little better than Sarah's, she is devastated: ``I feel like I've lost my job: wife.'' While Sarah's daughter seems obsessed with having children in quick succession, Harriet's offspring seems determined to be barren, and the younger man Harriet wants to take to bed has yet to succumb to her blandishments; but suddenly a new development wipes away all thoughts but survival. Hearon writes with energy and acuity; her wit takes the form of sharp apercus about human nature and society. If her themes are darker here than in previous books, her voice is stronger, more outspoken, and she wisely eschews easy answers to life issues. The narrative speaks instead of grace under pressure, of carrying on after loss and grief, of affirming the day and looking bravely at the future. It's a thoughtful and honest book, with real relevance to our lives. (Feb.)