The Bliss of Solitude

The Bliss of Solitude
by Dorothy Canfield

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Book Description
The Bliss of Solitude is a novel about sexual obsession, time’s transformation of memory, the gradual erosion of wonder, and the interplay between the external world and inner vision. Its heroine-narrator is Iris Cloud, a 43-year-old product of affluent Boston suburbs and an Ivy League education, who retreated to Vermont twenty years earlier to hide an illegitimate pregnancy and to escape the expectations of her perfectionist parents. Now she runs a hand-knit sweater shop with her longtime lover Carolyn in a small resort town, clinging all the while to memories of her dreamy, awed, and restrained childhood in which she aspired to becoming a great artist and later a renowned physician. Life is tranquil enough, if passion-less, until one day Iris finds out that her 20-year-old daughter, Lydia plans to marry a questionable young man whom she has known for all of three weeks. Iris, stricken with guilt, realizes that she must step in and fulfill her long-neglected! maternal duties to Lydia, who had left Iris as a young teenager to live with her grandparents. Iris becomes convinced that part of this duty involves doing what she never bothered doing twenty years earlier: seeking out Lydia’s father, her college boyfriend, and telling him that he has a daughter, a daughter on the verge of marriage. Iris’s search for Jack--a would-be modern-day Michelangelo whose egotistic delusions of grandeur underlie his paradoxical attractiveness--erodes the already fading relationship between Iris and Carolyn and forces Iris to confront the portrait-like reminiscences of her past that in many ways are more alive to her than her current quest.

From the Publisher
The Bliss of Solitude probes the nature of sexual obsession, the transformation of memory, the erosion of wonder, and the interplay between vision and reality. Its heroine is Iris Cloud, once an aspiring artist and physician whose dreams collapsed when she retreated to Vermont after college to hide an illegitimate pregnancy. For twenty years she’s had a peaceful, if passion-free, existence raising daughter Lydia and running a sweater shop with lover Carolyn. But when Lydia’s imprudent romance incites Iris to reunite with her college boyfriend--Lydia’s egotistical, erratic, but paradoxically attractive father--Iris’s serene life begins to unravel.

About the Author
The author of the novel Time’s Fool, Terra Ziporyn is an award-winning science and medical writer whose publications include The Harvard Guide to Women’s Health, Nameless Diseases, and Alternative Medicine for Dummies. She is also a playwright currently working on several projects with The New Tuners, a workshop dedicated to new musicals. She lives near Annapolis, Maryland with her political scientist husband, James Snider, and their three children, Pallas, Sage, and Solon.

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