Named a "Reader's Choice" for 1998 by "The Boston Globe"
When she was twenty-seven, Doris Grumbach was visited by what she recognized as the presence of God. For a woman with no religious education or faith, the event was as unexpected as it was joyful. It was also never repeated. In "The Presence of Absence," Grumbach recollects her quest to recover the sense of God's presence through formal worship, private devotion, and the study of literary accounts of epiphany. Her account is a moving and inspiring journey through "spiritual radiance," faith, and love.

In this elegant meditation on age and memory, Grumbach's grace, humor, and insight alert us to the transience of each day and the constant play between past and present.
"[A] book that astonishes in its honesty. . . . What greater gift can a memoir bring than a self revealed in all its grubby particulars, with wit and, when day is done, acceptance?" -Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, The Washington Post Book Review

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.

Last year, faced with a rare opportunity to experiment with solitude, acclaimed author Doris Grumbach decided to live for 50 days in her coastal Maine home, rarely speaking to anyone. The result of her experience is a beautiful meditation about what it means to write, to be alone, and to come to terms with mortality. A New York Times Notable Book of 1994. Line art.

The Magician's Girl tells the story of three New York women who meet at Barnard in the late 1930s and fulfill their separate destinies from the 1940s to 1978. Lyrical, dramatic, and wise, Grumbach's novel is rich with evocations of America's past, from the flavors of New York City to academic life in the 1970s.

"Boldly imagined, subtly crafted . . . eloquently documents the existence of women who lived as they wished to, instead of as society expected them to." —Catherine Stimpson, New York Times Book Review

The Ladies is a touching, imaginative retelling of the story of two of history's most interesting characters: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Psonsonby, well-born Irish women who defied all conventions of their eighteenth-century Irish homeland and eloped to the small hamlet of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived as a married couple. There, removed from the eyes of the world, they hoped to live out their quiet lives. But the world outside gradually came to claim the Ladies—first out of curiousity, but eventually on the basis of profound respect, and even love. Visited by such luminaries as Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Horace Walpole, among many others, Eleanor and Sarah became known throughout Britain and to history as the "Ladies of Llangollen."

"Grumbach is acutely sensitive to the quiet hum of everyday living and the small acquired habits that bond lovers over long periods. It is especially touching to watch the women age as the pages turn, affecting a kind of time-lapse realism that doesn't diminish the Ladies' passion or love for each other." —Diane Salvatore, Ms.

The Missing Person is a daring work that tells the story of Franny Fuller, the sexy, voluptuous movie star whose glorious blonde mane and whispery voice have aroused the fascination of every gossip columnist and moviegoer in the country. But beneath her radiant, compelling image lives still the frightened little girl from upstate New York. Define only by the way the studios, the flacks, her husbands and lovers, and the public perceive her, Franny Fuller is a missing person, no more tangible than the image projected of her on a thousand silver screens. Framing her portrait of Franny Fuller within a persuasive and moving story, Doris Grumbach has created a haunting work that probes the private misery behind public glamour."