The first buck she has ever seen on her property

crosses her window view of the accumulated leaves.

She knows he is chasing a female just vanished.

He is carelessly intent, rolling his head and rack.

A few feet from her safe position at the sink, he

looks through the glass, staring at her stares.

Then he snuffles into the leaves and snorts,

lolling his great tongue to catch the doe’s scent.

He breathes in rapid gasps and turns away from

the prying glass, leaping, then running after

the expectation of release. When the woman parts

a glass wall to organize the leaves, she encounters

the sweet, strong musk which penetrates her

as a wildness in her lungs, orchids and camellias,

pressing on her breastbone; she rakes up the air.

Virginia Walker has just come out with a collection of poems, “Neuron Mirror,” the sales of which go to the Lustgarten Foundation’s research into a cure for pancreatic cancer. The book, written with Michael Walsh, is dedicated to, among others, three South Fork poets who died of the disease: Robert Long, who was an editor at The Star, Siv Cedering, and Antje Katcher. Ms. Walker teaches at Dowling and Suffolk Community College and lives on Shelter Island.

Return of the Lit Lunch

There’s no shortage of writers in Sag Harbor, but there’s only one restaurant that can creditably claim to be the linchpin establishment that turned around what circa 1970 was a half-decrepit village — the American Hotel, which is where the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library will host this year’s fund-raising authors lunch at noon on Sunday.

The Harborite authors? James McMullan, the illustrator recently out with “Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood,” and Susan Scarf Merrell, whose new book, “Shirley: A Novel,” follows the ever-offbeat Shirley Jackson and her psychologically complicated year with a young grad school couple in Bennington, Vt., in the early 1960s. The lunch costs $50.

Brutality at a Beach House

Paul Batista, a trial lawyer, commentator on cable news shows, and expert on the anti-racketeering RICO statute, also happens to “write what he knows” — about crime and its prosecution. Case in point: his latest, “The Borzoi Killings,” which the, yes, Sag Harbor author has set in East Hampton, where, the story goes, one of the world’s richest men is murdered in his beach house. When a Mexican immigrant is the victim of a rush to judgment, it’s a trial attorney, Raquel Rematti, to the rescue.

But in the meantime, Mr. Batista will read from the thriller on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Hey, That Book Should Be a Movie!

Juliet Blake, a movie producer and summertime Amagansett resident, will give a primer on what — beyond sheer chutzpah — it takes to get a beloved book made into a feature film when she visits the BookHampton shop in East Hampton on Saturday. The title was Richard C. Morais’s “The Hundred-Foot Journey,” which Ms. Blake shopped around to Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, and Helen Mirren until the long-shot green light was given, with all three heavyweights involved in the production. She’ll tell the tale starting at 7 p.m.

Helen Harrison will sign copies of her new book, “Jackson Pollock,” on Saturday at 11 a.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

The book is a primer on the artist with a concise background and a description of his art during various periods of his life. It is part of the Phaidon publishing house’s Focus series of monographs and is amply illustrated.

Ms. Harrison, who directs the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, is a former New York Times art critic and has written many exhibition catalogs and articles. Her previous books have included “Hamptons Bohemia” and “Such Desperate Joy.”

The book costs $22.95 and includes admission to the museum if purchased in advance of the event in person at the museum or at parrishart.org.

“Cathedral”

Bill Henderson

Pushcart, $22

On a hill overlooking the sea, in Sedgwick, Me., Bill Henderson decided to build a cathedral. Though inspired by his visit to the Chartres Cathedral in France as a young man, this one would come out of his own imagination and spiritual journey; it would be borne of “my idea of holy.”

Mr. Henderson’s “Cathedral: An Illness and a Healing” tells the story of building this unusual structure, and also of his own kind of spirituality: There would be a lot of silence, the singing of hymns, unscripted prayers, using no single book. “This would be a cathedral of shut your mouth and listen.”

Choosing the rocks from the surrounding landscape was in itself a meditative process. He had no experience with such construction, but carried it out with no hurry with his daughter Holly and his constant canine companion, Lulu. The stones would be in honor or in memory of his saints — friends, neighbors, and family members whom we meet along the way.

The work was encumbered by persistent bad weather and other problems, and in the course of the project we see his searching for God, with its questioning, doubting, and probing. He wrestles with his “silent but devoted” Presbyterian upbringing, yet is always drawn back to an unadorned God of love, nature, simplicity, and wonder.

But in the middle of the project he is diagnosed with cancer, breast cancer at that, and it turns his life upside down. As it happened, he had a couple more cancer diagnoses over a few years, and even lost Lulu to a similar disease.

“I was caught between despair and the name of Jesus. That is all that remained of my faith. One word. No song. No hymn. A friend who had been to horror and back. Jesus.”

At one point during the “Cancer Years,” the style of writing changes abruptly from lyrical prose to very short and jagged incomplete sentences, with a brutal honesty. This is jarring and disconcerting, as it is meant to be, and it is a vivid, unvarnished account of his experience that many will relate to. Mr. Henderson says, “Journal entries recount the next years more precisely and more harshly than I can remember, for indeed many of those days I would like to forget, and have forgotten. A glowing prose would only create a gloss on the deep down horror.”

Eventually there is a healing, in the broad sense of the word — his own resurrection of sorts — and it takes place quietly and unexpectedly in a church in Springs that he intermittently attends.

Musing about atheists, he says what may be a good summary of his theology: “I don’t know enough about God to be an atheist.”

And yes, after standing incomplete and untouched for some time, the cathedral is finally finished, though in a somewhat downsized version of his original plan. It is a wonderful moment.

Mr. Henderson’s writing is beautiful, lyrical, and sometimes poetic. Before each chapter is a quote from the likes of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Chief Seattle, and Wendell Berry. The book has an appealing and easy-to-read layout, with short chapters, good use of white space, and expressive choices of type fonts that draw the reader in. There are a handful of small black-and-white photos, but if they were larger and clearer it would greatly enhance their overall effect.

In this inspiring spiritual memoir, Mr. Henderson gives us a lot to reflect on about life, death, love, relationships, small-town Maine, illness, despair, healing, and faith. It is moving and poignant, yet it is an easy read. Although I read the book in a fairly short time, I thought that I might like to reread a short chapter or two a day for reflection.

For those who are followers of Mr. Henderson’s, it is interesting that there is some overlap in timeline or subject matter between “Cathedral” and several of his other books: “Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction,” “All My Dogs: A Life,” and “Simple Gifts: One Man’s Search for Grace.”

Bill Henderson of Springs is founder of the Pushcart Press and editor of the Pushcart Prize.

“Land Rush”

Gary Reiswig

Archway, $11.99

Gary Reiswig’s slim volume of four stories and two essays — one a memoir and the other family history — evokes the feel of growing up on a farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the middle part of the last century. The essays bracket the stories in “Land Rush,” and there is little tonal or thematic difference between them. All the pieces draw from the same familial well and the experience of farm and small-town life on the Great Plains.

The memoir and history provide a touchstone for the stories and reveal how much of his life Mr. Reiswig uses to infuse his stories with a sense of verisimilitude. As he writes in his brief preface, “These stories are based on true events,” of real things remembered.

The opening memoir, “The Buffalo Roam: And, Then, What Next?,” recounts Mr. Reiswig’s start in learning the “difficult but necessary farm lessons,” those having to do with hard work and the care and loss of animals. Those lessons expand into larger life lessons as well. At 12, he has reached the age where he is no longer only a son, but also someone who is expected to work the farm and carry his weight. When his beloved dog needs to be put down, Mr. Reiswig’s father asks him to do it.

“It wasn’t that Dad wanted to shirk the job. Rather, he wanted to cultivate my ability to discharge that kind of difficult but necessary responsibility.” Yet he is unable to bring himself to shoot the dog and remains uncomfortable when plowing the field near where the dog’s bones lie. Mr. Reiswig learns his father’s lessons even while knowing his temperament will take him in a different direction than the family farm.

The father-son dynamic introduced in “The Buffalo Roam” is a central focus in the stories as well. In “The Box Supper,” a box supper auction to raise money for a school is the scene of an unsettling competition between a boy’s father and Dootie Poor, a neighboring farmer. Dootie is “a small wiry man with a smirking grin” who makes too many comments regarding the boy’s mother and involves her in a suggestive practical joke. The mother dislikes him and calls him “a lot of names,” but her husband depends on his help: “He has new machinery. He’s the best farmer around here.” As far as the work on the farm is concerned, they are “lucky to have such a good neighbor.”

At the auction, Dootie tries to bribe the boy into revealing which box lunch his mother prepared. A tense bidding war develops between the husband and Dootie when both recognize the box lunch. The boy feels but does not fully understand the sexual tension underlying the bidding. While he is not completely cognizant of what is happening among the adults, “the boy felt the truth.”

“Two-Door Hardtop” slightly alters the father-son dynamic. Dean and his uncle Bernie have a close relationship. Bernie buys a new car a month before leaving to serve in the Korean War. He gives Dean the responsibility of taking care of the car in his absence, even though Dean is not yet old enough to drive. The car holds the promise of adventure and a life lived for both of them. Dean takes his responsibility seriously and anxiously awaits his uncle’s return.

However, Bernie returns from the trauma of war a different man: “He looked so empty, like he had left something from inside himself back in Korea. . . .” Dean cannot understand the change in his uncle and his lack of interest in the car. When Bernie sells it, Dean feels betrayed and longs for the time when he will own a car.

“Fair Game” is the book’s central piece of fiction. The story shares the same material as Mr. Reiswig’s 1993 novel, “Water Boy,” and focuses on the relationship between Danny, the young star quarterback for the Cimmaron Dustdevils, the high school football team, and his best friend, Sonny, the team’s water boy. Sonny, protected and influenced by his mother, does not play on the team, making him something less than the other boys who do in a town where football dominates community life.

Danny has a “God-given talent” and is a “once-in-a-lifetime kid.” Sonny, who offers game-winning suggestions to Danny and a coach on the sidelines, wants to be recognized for his own worth. Yet, in a community where football is tantamount to religion, is the best Sonny can achieve the reflected glory of being Danny’s best friend?

This is a multilayered story, and a good deal happens beneath its surface; Mr. Reiswig handles these undercurrents well. He suggests the forces that pull adolescents in different, and often conflicting, directions. Within a few pages questions concerning friendship, responsibility, death, deception, the place of football and religion within small-town America, as well as the idea of achieving the best years of one’s life far too soon are all presented.

“Bright Angel Trail” is a story of a family’s trip to the Grand Canyon at Christmastime. The trip echoes the one family vacation the father remembers taking as a boy, and it triggers complex memories for him regarding his relationship with his father and to what extent he may be repeating the same pattern with his son. The son, struggling to understand his own individuality, “felt small and uneasy about his place on the planet. What was his purpose?”

There is an intricate relationship among the mother, father, and child. They share an inability to communicate fully what they need, desire, and fear. Again, Mr. Reiswig only hints at much of this, allowing the reader to ponder the possibilities of the family dynamic and their future relationship.

The final piece in the book, “Free Land,” briefly traces the history of the establishment of the Reiswig family in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Mr. Reis­wig’s ancestors moved from Germany to Russia in the 1700s to take advantage of free land to farm. The pattern is repeated in the next century when their descendants move from Russia to the United States to take advantage of the Homestead Act and settle on the high plains of the Panhandle. Mr. Reiswig provides a brief but vivid portrait of the harsh realities of trying to make a living farming on the plains, where the individual is at the mercy of the “landscape’s lack of generosity,” as he puts it elsewhere in the collection.

In his stories of young boys on the threshold of manhood, Mr. Reiswig portrays their dreams and desires, their uncertainties and fears — their longings to be recognized as mature and their, at times, foolish actions and subsequent feelings of guilt. They are acquiring an uneasy knowledge of the world’s realities and oddities, slowly coming to deal with loss, forgiveness, and understanding as they are initiated into experience.

Mr. Reiswig is not an effusive writer. He knows when not to say something, relying on subtlety and suggestion rather than an intrusive authorial voice. He has a plain and simple approach that emphasizes the commonplace and the past. All of these pieces have an easy, clear-eyed, conversational style — as if one were sitting around the kitchen table with a cup of coffee listening to Mr. Reiswig reminisce and tell his stories. It is not a bad way to spend an hour or two.

William Roberson taught literature at Southampton College for 30 years. He now works at LIU Post.

Gary Reiswig lives in Springs. A celebration of the release of “Land Rush” will take place at Ashawagh Hall in that hamlet on Dec. 19 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. There will be food and wine, and Mr. Reiswig will discuss the book at 6.

It’s not really fair, is it, to single out one writer as the highlight of a reading among putative equals, based solely on the whim of one faceless person at a keyboard. So anyway, Andre Dubus III will headline a reading from “Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the Small Presses,” which is out this week. The reading happens on Friday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. — a bit of advance notice, this, for your scheduling convenience. The place? The Strand bookstore on Broadway at East 12th Street in Manhattan. Admission is by way of the purchase of the featured anthology, which goes for $19.99, or a $15 Strand gift card.

Bill Henderson of Springs, Pushcart’s founder and editor, will handle the introductions. The evening is a collaboration with the Writers Studio, founded by the poet Philip Schultz, who lives in East Hampton.

Mr. Dubus is the author of “House of Sand and Fog,” the quintessential late-20th-century immigrants’ story, involving striving, prideful newcomers from Iran and down-and-out native-born Americans seemingly intent on squandering their lives and opportunities. Published in 1999, the novel was a National Book Award finalist. Mr. Dubus is also the author of a memoir, “Townie,” which casts his father, the late, great short-story writer Andre Dubus, in a not-so-flattering light.

The other readers are David Means, whose book of stories “Assorted Fire Events” was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Kim Addonizio, whose latest collection of poems is “The Palace of Illusions,” Michelle Seaton, a winner of a 2015 Pushcart Prize, and Jim White, a singer and songwriter on hand with his piece about David Byrne of Talking Heads fame.

“A Momentary Glory: Last Poems”

Harvey Shapiro

Wesleyan University Press, $24.95

Many years ago, Allen Planz said at one of his poetry readings at Canio’s Books that short poems were the most difficult to write. Too many poets, he said, seemed incapable of the compression and concision necessary to achieve success with short poems. Harvey Shapiro, apparently, has experienced no such trouble.

 In “A Momentary Glory: Last Poems,” published by Wesleyan University Press and edited by Shapiro’s literary executor, Norman Finkelstein, readers will notice the dexterity with which Shapiro shapes his short poems in this terrific collection of posthumous gleanings.

Most of these poems occupy a single page in this volume. Most of these poems are shorter than sonnets. Some of the longer poems, such as “Departures,” “Lines (3),” and “City Poem,” seem stitched together from shorter, fragmentary pieces that may have worked just as well individually.

These poems are so short that readers may wonder how they succeed at all. Shapiro’s poems eschew ornamentation. They lack, for the most part, figurative language. Robert Frost wrote that “Sound is the gold in the ore,” but readers will find none of that gold here. And, unlike that famous short poetic form haiku, Shapiro’s poems don’t focus on nature, per se, and they don’t march to a syllabic beat.

In fact, it may seem to readers that Shapiro has taken a monkish vow forswearing tropes, assonance, symbols, and objective correlatives, all the poetic armor of the ivory tower. Shapiro’s poems represent a refutation of Eliot’s high-minded rhetoric, of Stevens’s musical surrealism, of Frost’s insistence on traditional forms.

This is not to say, however, that Shapiro’s poems lack fundamental poetic qualities. On the contrary, what these poems evince is often missing from contemporary poetry — simple diction, clarity, and honesty.

“A Momentary Glory” makes clear Harvey Shapiro’s long affiliation with the Objectivist poets, whom he names in more than a few of these last poems. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Objectivism grew out of the imagism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and insists upon the use of the concrete for its inherent sensuousness and properties of individuality and uniqueness.

Shapiro makes no secret about his poetics. Many of the poems here concern poetry and Shapiro’s aesthetic position. For instance, “Poetics” makes clear Shapiro’s penchant for clarity:

In the argument over rhetoric

I am always for the lofty

but somehow wind up opting for the low.

Is that because Rezi speaks in me still

his Jewish moral concerns

which he wanted set down lucidly,

matter-of-factly,

with the lucidity, never prettiness

of Du Fu and Li Po.

“Rezi,” of course, is Charles Reznikoff, a leading Objectivist poet whose career spanned most of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, and who greatly influenced Shapiro’s work. Other Objectivists to whom Shapiro gives a shout-out in this collection include George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and Carl Rakosi. The allusion to Du Fu and Li Po is a nod to the pellucidity of Chinese poetry, to the virtues of brevity, compression, and clarity, tenets also of Objectivism.

Poetics aside, Shapiro’s poems also fascinate with quick cuts and juxtapositions. In “The People’s Poet,” for example, each of the poem’s four lines surprises because of their relationship to one another:

He was so pleased

with the poverty of his imagination.

It made him

brother to everyone.

One can’t quite imagine a poet pleased with an impoverished imagination, but here that very lack is an equalizer. This poem registers a profound recognition of poetry’s audience, that the dearth of, say, figurative language represents a democratization of poetry. The very prosaic qualities found in the Objectivists, including these last poems from Harvey Shapiro, close rather than widen the distance between poet and reader, suggesting that accessibility may be poetry’s finest virtue.

Other poems here work in this same brief and jarring manner. “The Old Jew,” “Nightpiece,” “Suburban Note,” and “George Oppen” spring an unexpected epiphany in the context of a few, otherwise innocuous, lines. Many of Shapiro’s poems hardly begin before they startle.

Shapiro achieves this with whatever subject is at hand. He writes about poets and poetry, World War II and his time in the service, aging and mortality, Jewishness, and memories of youthfulness and eroticism. This collection validates Shapiro’s reputation as an “earthy” poet, as in the first four lines of the book’s first poem, “The Old Man Has One Thought and Then Another”:

Let’s go out

And fart in the sunlight.

Let’s go to the playground

And check out the young mothers.

Or as in “Cynthia,” reprinted here in its entirety:

Reach in, she said,

and get some juice.

That was happiness.

For all this collection’s charms, readers may find some of the poems too brief and fragmentary. Some poems lack the quick epiphany or jarring juxtaposition that make the best poems here work. One example of just such a poem is “Florida”: “The sea beating / against the parking lots.”

A few other poems like this, mere postcards, appear here and there, but this book is worth a reader’s time and money. Don’t let the fact that this volume can be read — twice — in a couple of hours delude you into thinking you can write poems, too; Shapiro’s breezy offhandedness is the result of a lifetime of writing poems and of learning what to include and what to leave out, a skill few young poets today, no matter their aesthetic affiliations, seem to possess.

Harvey Shapiro’s poems, for the most part, attract and hold a reader’s attention because he has chiseled them down to their bare essentials, and each of the best shines radiantly, a momentary glory.

Dan Giancola is a professor of English at Suffolk Community College. His collections of poems include “Part Mirth, Part Murder” and “Data Error.”

The poetry of Harvey Shapiro, who divided his time between Brooklyn and East Hampton and died in January 2013 at the age of 88, will be celebrated with a group reading at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Thinking Differently

David Flink, a founder of Eye to Eye, a national mentoring program, is not only an expert in learning disabilities, he has had his own struggles with them, specifically dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, he’s bringing all of that background to the East Hampton Library in a program for parents. Called “Thinking Differently: Reframing Learning for a New Generation,” it starts at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.

In his new book, “Thinking Differently: An Inspiring Guide for Parents of Children With Learning Disabilities,” he explains the difficulties and diagnoses, and offers strategies for how parents can be the best possible advocates for children. Building self-esteem and remaking the learning environment are also addressed.

Women Voters Host Sheehy

A lit lunch on the Shinnecock Canal? Not a bad afternoon. Cowfish restaurant in Hampton Bays will be the site of the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons’ fall author lunch on Friday, Nov. 14, from noon to 3 p.m., with Gail Sheehy discussing her new autobiography, “Daring: My Passages.” It details her work at New York magazine during its 1970s heyday, the splash she made with the hit book “Passages,” and her relationship with the influential magazine editor Clay Felker. Copies will be available for purchase and signing.

The lunch, including a three-course meal, costs $60. R.S.V.P.s are due by Monday, and checks made out to L.W.V. Hamptons can be sent to Gladys Remler at 180 Melody Court, Eastport 11941. The number to call with questions is 288-9021.

Here’s a cat story that won’t make you groan. First of all, Rupert, in Jules Feiffer’s latest book for children, “Rupert Can Dance” (Michael di Capua, $17.95), isn’t what you’d call cute, more like an orange Yoda on all fours. And he doesn’t just lie around, he’s got a passion for strutting and prancing while his owner, little Mandy, sleeps. He even uses her dancing shoes.

Then the interesting cat-human dynamic: “Rupert loved having a secret from Mandy. Cats love secrets and Rupert took great pride that his secret was one of the best ever.” When he’s found out, he hides, mortified, under a bed for three days.

“The fun in dancing was to do it his own way. In secret. And without having to take lessons.” Ah. What’s dancing without freedom?

But, no worries, Mandy uses her wits and diplomacy to come up with a mutually beneficial solution, and pet and owner pirouette the day away.

It’s been about 14 years since Mr. Feiffer, now an East Hamptoner, ended his decades-long run as a cartoonist for The Village Voice, where his outwardly happy dancer loosed a worried stream of political and social comment. Graphically speaking, it’s nice to see a return to form.

“The Adventures of Two

Black Bear Cubs”

Northern New Jersey must be one of the world’s great experiments in big game living cheek-by-jowl with humanity and all of its enticingly ripe refuse. Never mind the controversial bear hunts, Susan Kehoe, who owns a second home in East Hampton, headed out into the woods, camera in hand, capturing image after image for “The Adventures of Two Black Bear Cubs” (self-published, $16.95).

The book follows the cubs and their mother from springtime foraging through hibernation — with rare touches like an exhausted mama bear having fallen asleep so quickly she left her paw sticking out of the den — to the day when the growing cubs leave the den behind for good.     

There’s an awful lot of anthropomorphizing here, but kids will love the pictures of the adorable cubs rolling, wrestling, sleeping in branches, snuggling with their mother, and seemingly mugging for the camera.

“I’m Brave!”

Kate and Jim McMullan of Sag Harbor are back with a new installment, “I’m Brave!” (Balzer and Bray, $16.99), in their boyish series of picture books (“I’m Fast!,” “I’m Bad!,” “I’m Dirty!,” “I Stink!”). It stars a grinning red fire engine racing to an inferno at a faceless city warehouse.

He’s nothing if not enthusiastic about his job and every last accoutrement on his six-figure person (I guess the phrase “a whole lotta hose” couldn’t be avoided?). There’s even a matching game tucked into the story featuring the immortal Halligan and other tools of the trade.

These are big, bold images in watercolor and gouache by Mr. McMullan — every one of them a fold-spanning two pages. And while there’s water cannon action, it’s also a good nuts-and-bolts intro to the job of the firefighter, from details as small as the use of wheel chocks to the mundane cleanup afterward and the squeegeeing and repacking of those hoses.

“Echoes of Heartsounds”

Martha Weinman Lear

Open Road, $9.99

Martha Weinman Lear’s new book, “Echoes of Heartsounds,” directly evokes her riveting, unsparing memoir “Heartsounds.” In the earlier work her husband, Hal, a beloved doctor, had a massive heart attack, followed by complications that led to his death at 57. The irony is not lost on Ms. Lear when, 30 years later, she has a coronary and ensuing infection and finds herself in the same hospital ward with the same attending physician.

Although she finds kindred spirits among many of the medical professionals, she is also afflicted with some of the same ignominy, the coldness, the cruelty that assaulted her first husband. Of course she is terrified that her outcome will be the same as her husband’s. But despite the parallels, Ms. Lear is far too clever and introspective a writer to be content with comparing and contrasting two myocardial infarctions.

“Echoes” is really a book about marriage, about long-ago widowhood, and about the “marriage” within oneself of former and present spouses, and the delicate balance that goes on within one’s soul as one honors the first spouse while loving the one who is present. Long after Hal’s death, Ms. Lear fell in love with and married Albert Ruben, a screenwriter.

One evening after eating mushroom barley soup, Ms. Lear becomes quite ill. It couldn’t possibly be the soup — she’d made it herself the night before. Albert speaks to her doctor, who maintains that vomiting is not a symptom of a heart attack but encourages Ms. Lear to go for an EKG the next day. The test reveals that something has happened, and a birthday trip she and Al were taking to Charleston was immediately canceled.

Shortly after she is admitted, Ms. Lear says she’s feeling fine and Al comes to the hospital, loops his arm through hers for a walk, and suddenly “everything turned surreal. Everything was powered by the most vivid sense of having been there before.” Ms. Lear feels she’s “tripping into Hal’s coronary and he into mine, even as I walked there with Al, oh, it was all so weird, and I knew that I was conflating the two men, both beloved, apart from my father the only men I ever truly loved, confusing them now in that strange and discomforting way, joining myself now with the one and then with the other, and their own images floating into and out of each other.”

Ms. Lear describes how she and Al had walked on West 86th Street shortly after they’d met, strolling hand in hand, knowing they were about to embark on something “serious.”

Transitions and the back story are an important part of this memoir. Years before, when Ms. Lear first decided to move into Al’s Central Park West apartment, “those first months were not easy. We were both out of the habit of compromise, flexible as a pair of wooden yardsticks.” And then Al asks Ms. Lear if he should take down the photos of the life he led with his wife Judy, who had died, their children, their grandparents. And rather than erase his past, they kept the photos and added her family photos, her grandparents’ and parents’ wedding portraits, and, as she points out, the photo of her wedding to Hal hung close to the photo of Al and Judy’s wedding. Those photos were joined by the “Al-and-Martha pictures,” representing a richer, fuller set of lives.

Ms. Lear’s comment is so original and so astute: “It may be love that makes the world go round, but continuity is what keeps it on its axis.”

But flash forward to the hospital: Things have grown much worse. Ms. Lear develops a staph infection that causes delirium and requires heavy-duty antibiotics. Days later as she’s coming to her senses and desperately wants to leave, she learns she has three choices: Return home (the antibiotics alone would be $500, never mind the astronomical cost of aides), stay in the hospital, or check into a nursing home.

She recounts a visit to a friend who’d gone to such a facility “to recover.” The portrait is bleak: “I had seen him there, seen the elders slumped catatonic in their wheelchairs lining the corridor walls, seen him visiting among them, head in his hands, staring into some grim personal space, smelled that odor — that characteristic ineffable odor of such places, attar of dust, decay, urine, grief, fear, hopelessness, eruptions of gas, exhalations of bile, floor wax, room fresheners (carnation, lavender, lily-of-the-valley), ammonia cleaners, astringent sanitizers — and I had thought, Oh, sweet Jesus, if sickness isn’t enough to finish a body off, this place could do it.”

The hospital staff encourages her to stay put. But Al wants her home. Again Ms. Lear uses her knowledge of the marital state and its intersection with the human condition for an observation. “ ‘Let’s sleep on it,’ [Al] said, which is what you always say about the indecisions that will keep you sleepless.”

In the end she remains in the hospital, and because she is “bad enough,” the physiotherapy department allows her admission to its special program — the aftermath of the staph infection gave her the leg up. On its own the heart attack wouldn’t have been “bad enough” to warrant the therapy. But the staph has provided her with the jobs of relearning to walk, to understand the mechanical requirements of getting in and out of cars, and of bathing and dressing. Even making a cup of tea becomes a task of gargantuan proportions.

But as I said, this is really a memoir about marriage. One of the book’s most poignant scenes falls between Hal’s death and Ms. Lear’s meeting Al. In a flashback she recalls driving on the Long Island Expressway when a tire blew; she over-steered and ended up spinning. Astonished to be alive as she emerged to the gawking of rubberneckers, she felt she had to get to a pay phone to call her husband, Hal. “But wait. Some problem here . . . I can’t call Hal. Hal is dead.”

She had in that instant “the most piercing sense that this was what marriage meant: Marriage meant that there was someone in the world whom you must call — not those whom you may call, not the relatives and friends who hold you dear and who would grieve if you were gone, but the one person, even if, let’s say, you do not hold each other so dear, the one person whom it would be unthinkable not to call — a matter of basic domestic civility, like calling to say that you won’t be home for dinner — and to whom you say, ‘Listen, I was almost killed on the Long Island Expressway but I am all right and not to worry and I will be home soon.’ ”

In the end the greatest task for Ms. Lear is to persuade the ghost of her first husband, Hal, to recede and let her resume her current life. There is a pull and push throughout the hospital stay as Ms. Lear bravely reveals her petulance with Al. But then she is able to return home in time for Thanksgiving dinner, surrounded by present family. Still recuperating, but with a renewed, vibrant inner voice: “Continuity, it said.”

Martha Weinman Lear lives in New York and East Hampton.

Laura Wells regularly contributes book reviews to The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor.