To the Boathouse

The memoir of a southern girl and her maturing sense of self as she grows to become a prolific and accomplished writer and critic. Mary Ann Caws recounts the tangled relationships of her family, and her own ties to her sister, parents, and the grandmother - a painter - who served as her role model for a life of passionate engagement.

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To the Boathouse is the memoir of a southern girl and her maturing sense of self as she grows to become one of the most prolific and accomplished writers and critics of our day. Mary Ann Caws recounts the tangled relationships of her family, and her own ties to her sister, parents, and the grandmother - a painter - who served as her role model for a life of passionate engagement. The southern landscape plays a central role in her early life in North Carolina, where she makes her debut and begins to struggle with accepted social values of the time and region. Caws sketches her educational experiences at Bryn Mawr, in Paris, and at Yale - where she weds a professor of philosophy. She recounts the joys, small and large, of a complicated marriage that ends in divorce, after which she strives toward self-sufficiency and self-understanding. Caws relates her passion for writing, teaching, art, and poetry; her friendships with the writers, artists, and intellectuals who provided sanctuary for her mind and heart; and the many light-filled summers spent with her children at their field house in Provence.
The author returns to visit the tangled vines of the southern landscape and her hometown and dwells on the steadying influence in her life of a singular place: the boathouse in New York's Central Park where for most of her adulthood she has retreated for peace and solace and where, finally, she and her children row out on the water to toast their lives, their city, and their sense of home.