At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the celebrated feminist novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the Maine coast. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found to her astonishment that she was learning to live all over again, discovering capacities for thought, feeling, and sensual delight that she had never imagined before.

Her transforming summer experiences were only the beginning, though. In this luminous, spirited book, she charts her subsequent path - as she learned to celebrate the joys of meditative solitude, and to integrate her new awareness into a busy, committed, even hectic mainland life.