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Kelly McMasters

Biography

Kelly McMasters

Kelly McMasters is the author of THE LEAVING SEASON and WELCOME TO SHIRLEY, an Orion Book Award finalist, and coeditor of the anthologies WANTING: Women Writing About Desire and THIS IS THE PLACE: Women Writing About Home, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post Magazine and the Paris Review Daily. A former bookshop owner, she teaches at Hofstra University and lives in New York.

Kelly McMasters

Books by Kelly McMasters

The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays
by Kelly McMasters - Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

Kelly McMasters found herself in her mid-30s living her fantasy: she’d moved with her husband from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, where their children roamed idyllic acres. The pastoral landscape and the bookshop they opened were restorative at first, for her and her marriage. But soon she was quietly plotting her escape. In THE LEAVING SEASON, McMasters chronicles the heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating balance between seeing and being seen; loss and longing; desire and doubt; and the paradox of leaving what you love in order to survive.