THINGS TO COME AND GO

Esti, a merciless, astute observer, recalls growing up amid (the confusions and difficulties of) their history, quarrels, judgements, noisy love and inescapable bonds of blood.

In 'The Old Wheeze' a single mother in her twenties returns to her sunless apartment after a date at the ballet. Shifting between four viewpoints - the young woman, the older professor who took her out, her son, and her son's babysitter - the story masterfully captures the impossibility of liberating ourselves from the self. In 'The Life You Gave Me', a woman at the midpoint of life is called to her father's sickbed.

A lament for all that is forever unsaid and unsayable, the story is 'an anguished meditation on growing up, growing old and being left behind, a complaint against time.' (The New York Times)First published in 1984, Things to Come and Go, Bette Howland's final book, is a collection of haunting urgency about arrivals and departures, and the private, insoluble dramas in the lives of three women.