Drinking the Rain
By Alix Kates Shulman
Farrar Straus Giroux, 242 pages, $20
Ten years ago at 50, Alix Kates Shulman hit a critical period in her life. At the time she was living in New York City, a successful novelist, essayist, teacher, a feminist and political activist, the mother of two children and a wife in a long but deteriorating marriage.
Her life had always been hectic, but she had considered it stimulating. Then, as she reached this birthday milestone, Shulman realized that many of the causes she had worked for so devotedly were moving on, leaving her and her contemporaries behind. She suddenly felt “a relic,” although outwardly she was as enthusiastic and vigorous as she had always been.
Busy as her world was, Shulman began to think of it as empty. “Worst of all,” Shulman writes in “Drinking the Rain,” her thoughtful, lyrical memoir, “I felt myself growing superfluous; the world I’d once loved so fiercely started to lose the savor.”
At the same time, she lost the confidence to write, although a new book was due.
Shulman called a halt and took a time of quiet in order to get back in touch with herself and her purpose in life. She left New York to live alone on a remote island off the coast of Maine. Her home for six months was a tiny, rustic cabin perched on a green, rockbound promontory. It had been her family’s vacation retreat for years, but now she had chosen to go there alone. She took up residence without plumbing, electricity, nearby neighbors.
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The first half of “Drinking the Rain” is a remembrance of the author’s joy in this solitary lifestyle. Within a week she had adjusted to the slower rhythm of the natural world around her. For the first time she really observed the pull of the tides, the exotic sea creatures in the water and on the beach, the plant life around her.
She gathered food each day and made herself marvelous meals, which she describes lovingly. She thought, dreamed and dawdled with no worry about the passage of time.
Her days were full again, but with soul- and body-reviving sights and experiences. The reader, even the most citified, is carried along as Shulman lives each day.
The second half of her memoir describes Shulman’s life after she rejoined her former world. She returned from the island clear-eyed and ready to again take up some of her usual interests, but strong enough, when given a chance, to branch out in other directions.
She accepted teaching stints. She ended her debilitating marriage, made new friends and eventually moved into a fulfilling romantic relationship.
But she never lost her newfound love of investigating nature. And she has never given up spending her summers on that island off the coast of Maine.