Skip to main content

Martha McPhee

Biography

Martha McPhee

Martha McPhee is the author of the novels AN ELEGANT WOMAN, BRIGHT ANGEL TIME, GORGEOUS LIES, L’AMERICA and DEAR MONEY, and has written a memoir, OMEGA FARM. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. GORGEOUS LIES was a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches fiction at Hofstra University and lives in New York City.

Martha McPhee

Books by Martha McPhee

Omega Farm: A Memoir
by Martha McPhee - Memoir, Nonfiction

In March 2020, Martha McPhee, her husband and their two children set out for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she finds herself grappling simultaneously with a mother slipping into severe dementia and a house that’s fallen into neglect. As Martha works to manage her mother’s care and the sprawling, ramshackle property --- a broken septic system, invasive bamboo, dying ash trees --- she is swept back, unwillingly, into memories of her fraught, dysfunctional childhood.

An Elegant Woman
by Martha McPhee - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

As Isadora, a novelist, and two of her sisters sift through the artifacts of their forebears’ lives, trying to decide what to salvage and what to toss, the story shifts to a winter day in 1910 at a train station in Ohio. Two girls wait in the winter cold with their mother --- the mercurial Glenna Stewart --- to depart for a new life in the West. As Glenna campaigns in Montana for women’s suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses, Tommy takes care of her little sister, Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house and cooking, while Katherine goes to school. When Katherine graduates, Tommy makes a decision that will change the course of both of their lives.