Still Life with Chickens: Starting Over in a House by the Sea Hardcover - 2006

by Catherine Goldhammer

For the millions who loved A Year by the Sea comes a memoir of a woman who awakens at midlife to find wisdom in a most unlikely place

In this lovely, unconventional, often funny memoir, we meet Catherine Goldhammer, newly separated and several tax brackets poorer, forced by circumstance to move from the affluent New England suburb of her daughter's childhood into a new, more rustic life by the sea. Against all logic, partly to please her daughter and partly for reasons not clear to her at the time, she begins this year of transition by purchasing six baby chickens-whose job, she comes to suspect, is to pull her and her daughter forward, out of one life and into another.

As she gradually transforms her new house, nine hundred feet from the sea-with its tawdry exterior but radiant soul-tile by tile, flower bed by flower bed, as she watches her precocious twelve-year-old daughter blossom into a stylish and sophisticated teenager, and as she tends to the needs of six enigmatic chickens, Catherine's life starts to slowly shift from chaos to grace. Beautifully written and ultimately inspiring, Still Life with Chickens is an unforgettable lesson in hope, in starting over, and in the transcendent wisdom that can often be found in the most unlikely of places.