Extra Innings: A Memoir.

In her previous memoir (Coming into the End Zone, reviewed in Commonweal December 6,1991), Doris Grumbach told about her life as she saw it during her seventy-first year. Extra Innings is a continuation and expansion of her Story.

In Coming into the End Zone Grumbach overcame her anger and grief at coming closer to mortality, which the deaths of friends - especially young ones, of AIDS - and her own advanced age forced her to confront. This theme seems to have been the most striking one to reviewers and other readers and Extra Innings begins with the publication of the first book and reactions to it. Most people who talked or wrote about Grumbach's first memoir commented on her depression over growing old and facing - dreading - death. Grumbach leads such a pleasant life - such a full and fulfilled one - that of course she's sad at the thought of its ending. Her writing, however, conveys more joie de vivre than melancholy. She is blessed, and no matter how much grumbling she does, she knows it, a fact that's especially evident here.

Extra Innings, like Coming into the End Zone, takes the form of a journal - short sections that tell of daily thoughts and events. Woven in, however, sometimes in anecdotes and sometimes by allusion, is her life story. Born into an extremely wealthy New York family (her grandmother, when already rich, called her broker and told him to buy stock - at 25 cents a share - in a new company she'd read about in the newspaper, spelling the name she didn't know how to pronounce: X-E-R-O-X), Grumbach failed the New York Regents exams because she'd played hooky from school and had not read the required books. She nevertheless continued her education through a Ph.D., married, raised four daughters, and then left her husband to start a new life with another woman. She has had a long career as a teacher, writer, and critic. Born a Jew, she became a Catholic but left the church because of its treatment of women, and is now an Episcopalian, still deeply concerned with faith and prayer. Grumbach has traveled widely and often, and although she has lived in cities she is now most content living near a quiet cove in Maine. Her book is more like a novel than conventional nonfiction because Grumbach explains almost nothing - she presents the life she's chosen to reveal.

Her method is highly effective. Grumbach is a genius at conveying intimacy without prurience. The great charm of her memoirs is the friendship they offer; she describes and alludes to her own friends, and becomes the reader's friend, or at least a friend the reader would like to have. The Doris Grumbach character who's the author on the page is a sensible exotic, a wise chum. She's lucky and opinionated, feels grumpy but acts polite, and has made a consistent life out of apparent contradictions - reason enough for her to write her memoirs.

Hope and promise prevail. V.S. Pritchett, in his eighties, rose in the morning and rushed upstairs to his study, eager to get his thoughts down, his stories told, his essays clear. That anecdote about Pritchett cheers me, as Grumbach's book does. Extra Innings is full of detail that seems familiar but fresh. The author's voice is cultivated, plain-spoken, and thoroughly thought-out. She tells of twisted ankles, trips to the dentist, the heart-stopping dread at her child's illness, her love for her family and friends and for Sybil, her companion. Most of all, she keeps changing her life, improving and enriching it so as to find the place - physical, emotional, intellectual - where she'll find contentment. She's been contented before (many times, it seems), but when she's become restless or afraid has moved on. Though she thinks she's settled at last, I'm not so sure. Grumbach always has another idea, and while sometimes the stiffbacked lady (for example, she hates having casual acquaintances calling her by her first name), she's also open - specially to a move, to new thoughts and actions.

That's her charm. She looks back at her fifties as youth: a time she started a new life. In her seventies, despite her worries, her references to despair, and her occasional jab at resignation, she still appears to be creating, reshaping, going forward into the future.

Grumbach's memoirs have the bounce that age, experience. and continued energy confer. Part of the companionship they offer is a shot of inspiration.