Guesswork A Reckoning With Loss

"[A] splendid and subtle memoir in essays" —The New York Times Book Review

Having lost eight friends in ten years, Cooley retreats to a tiny medieval village in Italy with her husband. There, in a rural paradise where bumblebees nest in the ancient cemetery and stray cats curl up on her bed, she examines a question both easily evaded and unavoidable: mortality. How do we grieve? How do we go on drinking our morning coffee, loving our life partners, stumbling through a world of such confusing, exquisite beauty?

Linking the essays is Cooley’s escalating understanding of another loss on the way, that of her ailing mother back in the States. Blind since Cooley’s childhood, her mother relies on dry wit to ward off grief and pity. There seems no way for the two of them to discuss her impending death. But somehow, by the end, Cooley finds the words, each one graceful and wrenching.

Part memoir, part loving goodbye to an unconventional parent, Guesswork transforms a year in a pastoral hill town into a fierce examination of life, love, death, and, ultimately, release.

Martha Cooley is the author of the national bestseller The Archivist and Thirty-Three Swoons. The Archivist was a New York Times Notable hardback and a New and Noteworthy paperback. Cooley’s short fiction and essays have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, Southampton Review, The Common, PEN America, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She has served as a contributing editor at the Writer’s Chronicle and is currently a contributing editor at A Public Space. Her co-translations of Italian fiction and poetry include Antonio Tabucchi’s story collection Time Ages in a Hurry and a selection of contemporary Italian poetry in Those Who From Afar Look Like Flies: The Novecento, Part 3 (forthcoming, Univ. of Toronto Press). A professor of English at Adelphi University, Cooley taught for 15 years in the Bennington Writing Seminars. She divides her time between Queens, New York, and Castiglione del Terziere, Italy. She is married to the writer and translator Antonio Romani. Their American cat, Zora, is named after one of the cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and their Italian cat, Tristana, is named after the medieval knight.