Still Life with Chickens

March 20, 2006
From her book's opening lines, Goldhammer admits to the many insecurities she faced during her year of transition—during which she gets a divorce, slides "about three tax brackets poorer," relocates to a tattered New England cottage and singlehandedly raises her 12-year-old daughter, as well as half a dozen chicks—while cheekily setting herself apart from her competition in the memoir genre: "I did not have a year in Provence or a villa under the Tuscan sun. I did not have a farm in Africa." Goldhammer, a published poet, has an eye for life's mundane details, and these minutiae can grow tiresome ("We went through two mops, several sponges.... We broke one mop right in half"). But her recounting of her frustrations and her joys while remodeling the house and rearing the chickens is not only amusing but sometimes reads like a self-help manual, in which readers conclude that rolling up one's sleeves, getting busy and staying occupied with any strange new interest can successfully distract one from life's larger trials. As Goldhammer notes, "I had thought I was renovating a house. I didn't know that in the process I would also rebuild my life."