The first book by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach is an intimate, personal collection of essays, remembrances, and columns that follows in the creative nonfiction tradition of Anna Quindlen and May Sarton. While it recounts the experience and observations of a divorced, working mother, it expresses hopes and fears universal to all women.

Steinbach focuses on the big and small things of life: the bond between lifelong friends; coming to grips with loss; the quiet, everyday moments between parents and child; the spiritual connection to nature; the realities of being a single parent. She writes of the people who've touched her own life: the influential teacher; the worldly aunt; the writer hero; the woman she sees regularly at a bus stop as both head to work. She offers us beautifully written lessons she's learned during a lifetime of changes and challenges.