A Sinner of Memory

In this collection of essays, poet and essayist Melita Schaum reflects on individual experience from the perspective of a wanderer in mid-journey: a woman in her 40s, traveler, writer, and self- styled seeker who finds herself flaunting the "system" and bucking the odds. Contemplating marriage at age 44, trying to sort out the tangles of a midlife relationship, waffling about parenthood and freedom, she speaks to anyone who has tried to live an examined life or who has ever wondered whether happiness and unconventionality can coexist.
Like their author, these essays roam the globe: Paris, Venice, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, an arts colony in the southern California desert, a snowbound cabin in the Catskills. The essays touch on themes of mortality and love, loss and recovery, and invite us to smile at the levity and accident of getting it right.
A Sinner of Memory is about chance and choice, about wonder and catastrophe. It deals in the incongruous, but it amazes with unplanned congruities as well: pattern, composition, the pleasure of recurrence, as in music or poetry or love. Like life, these essays take us to unexpected places. They show that, whether the journey is across continents or in the heart, "we never land where it was we meant to land."