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.

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.

“The Social Climber’s Bible”

Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson

Penguin, $20

John Updike insisted on writing his own jacket copy. A curious fact that can pop up when you least expect it. If you happen to be reading jacket copy.

The authors of “The Social Climber’s Bible,” Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson, use their new book’s back flap to set the tone for what’s inside: Ms. Johnson “is a graduate of Barnard College, manages her family estate,” yes, she’s of the Johnson & Johnson Johnsons, “serves as Master of Fox Hounds, and raises heritage turkeys.”

Furthermore, she “hopes that collaborating with her uncle, Dirk” — who reports inches above on the flap that he “summers on the wrong side of the tracks in East Hampton” — “does not get her kicked out of any of the clubs she belongs to.”

On the contrary, they’re here to help you get in. Sure, this is comedy that exposes what the authors call “our present-day culture’s final taboo,” but it’s also exhaustive, if arch, quasi-social science, almost 300 pages of it in a 5-by-7-inch format perfect for the top of the porcelain tank. There’s even a Wittenborn-Johnson Psychological Aptitude Test for Social Climbers. (Mr. Wittenborn’s father invented the Wittenborn psychiatric rating scale and was a noted expert and researcher in pharmacology, all explored in his son’s often satirical 2008 novel, “Pharmakon.”)

Of the 19 chapters, “How to Get More Out of a Cocktail Party Than a Hangover” is exemplary, offering tips separated out in shaded boxes for quick perusal: “Never walk directly to the bar,” or, “Never underestimate the value of kissing your hosts on all four of their cheeks.” Speaking of hosts, Mr. Wittenborn and Ms. Johnson point out, “never, never say, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ The graceful social climber always greets a stranger with: ‘So nice to see you again. . . .’ ”

“By giving the illusion that you have met before, you will be that much closer to actually having a genuine friendship.”

Each chapter is peppered with Empowering Thoughts, one elucidating “The Three Questions You Never Want to Ask at a Cocktail Party,” the third being “What do you do?” which, the authors point out, “really translates into ‘How much do you make?’ [and] is more tactfully handled by making a supposition: ‘Aren’t you in finance?’ ”

And like that.

If you’re of a certain age, “The Social Climber’s Bible” may well put you in mind of Stephen Potter’s midcentury “One-Upmanship,” a classic of the guide genre, with its driest of dry British wit.

Here, Mr. Wittenborn and Ms. Johnson employ no shortage of verbal feints, saying what they don’t mean, laying on amusing qualifiers: “We mention this,” they write of Ralph Lauren’s promotion of the WASP aesthetic, “not in any way to imply Ralph was obsessed with or fetishized the glamour of snobbery,” or, “If we were being mean we might . . . suggest corporate raider Ron Perelman was the inspiration for SpongeBob’s snobby neighbor, Squidward.”

Just one more. On the Middletons, “Did Kate and Pippa stop climbing when they were nicknamed the Wisteria Sisters in honor of that clingy, climbing, flowering vine? Of course not; they climbed faster.”

Good, catty fun. 

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

All in the family, sort of, the Springs and Pushcart Press families: Linda Coleman, whose memoir, “Radical Descent,” is newly published by Pushcart, and Bill Henderson, the press’s founder, both of whom live in the hamlet, will join up for a two-for-one reading and book chat on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

Mr. Henderson will have new work on hand, too — “Cathedral: An Illness and a Healing.” Just out from W.W. Norton, it relays the experiences of “an aging man,” he writes, “who builds a holy place in his backyard. It involves bugs, lousy weather, cancer, and spiritual waverings.” In other words, it is in some ways a follow-up to two of his previous books, “Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction,” which detailed his building efforts on his property in Maine, and “Simple Gifts: One Man’s Search for Grace,” a personal look at great hymns of the Protestant tradition.

Ms. Coleman’s book, subtitled “The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary,” chronicles her troubled “descent” from a privileged background into the life of an early 1970s leftist radical, to the point of facilitating violence. Now an ordained Zen Buddhist monk, she has taught memoir writing to incarcerated women and works as a nurse.  

“Only You”

Eileen Obser

Oak Tree Press, $14.95

Eileen Obser, freelance writer, editor, and teacher, has written a book about sex.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, “Only You” is a memoir about her experience as a 1950s teen bride in Queens, unable to give her young husband, Billy, what he clearly wants and expects on their wedding night. And every night thereafter — daytimes too — though it’s not for her lack of trying.

She’s scared and he’s persistent. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” he asks after his honeymoon advances fail to arouse her.

Worried that something is wrong with her, but intuiting that her mother would not be the one to ask — months before, she had told her young daughter that she was relieved her husband “doesn’t bother me anymore” and “finally leaves me alone” — she bears her burden silently, too humiliated even to share her secret with a beloved aunt.

Sometimes “trying,” other times putting Billy off with “later,” often faking sleep to avoid sex, always dreading the night, Ms. Obser finds herself with nowhere to turn.

Using song titles of the era as chapter headings, Ms. Obser evokes Lindy Hops, a candy store crowd, and good middle-class Catholic girls not “doing it” till they marry — marriage being a ticket out of her parents’ house, with their quarrels and constant bickering about money, of which there never seems to be enough.

A ticket out of one problem, maybe, but an express train to another — her handsome husband is possessive and could be crude and obnoxious. The intimacy she believes sex will bring eludes her.

Wondering if she would feel differently “with another guy,” she remembers Augie Vrondis, her “biggest teen crush,” and a dance contest they won.

“We moved dreamlike, possessed. Round and round, back and forth, swinging, swaying. Come close, get wrapped up in each other’s arms, soooo close, then separate. Do it again.” A joy in movement.

Her emotional pain and desire for more in her marriage made clear, Ms. Obser again recalls better times, and in one of the book’s livelier scenes — I often found the narrative lacked momentum, with sundry details about what characters said and wore slowing it down — she tracks back to her father, Albert Kirchner, previously drawn as humorless and stingy, now mimicking Edward R. Murrow interviewing a celebrity.

“It’s good to see you, Ed,” my father said, taking him to our bay window and pushing aside the limp, off-white curtains. “As you can see, we have quite a view from here,” and his hand swept . . . a view of the tops of more houses, a few trees, the railroad tracks and a cemetery to the left. . . . “This is a little something from our art collection,” he said, pointing to a faded, stained Currier & Ives print that had hung there for as long as I could remember.

. . . He kept it up, showing “Ed” all our family treasures — ashtrays, beer glasses, the inside of our coat closet, stains on the rug, until my mother, Buddy [her cousin], and I laughed so hard our stomachs ached.

A year and a half into her marriage and still a virgin, Ms. Obser takes matters into her own hands.

She consults with her priest. She sees a doctor, telling him of “the stomach spasms, dull aches and heartburn” that plague her when it’s time for bed. A simple surgical procedure solves the physical side of her problem. She can “do it.” But in an odd turn of events, now that she’s willing and able, Billy has other ideas. Annulment is what he’s thinking; he’s found someone else.

“Cast aside, rejected by [her] husband,” the ending of her marriage feels like “the death of all thoughts of love and happiness.” But Ms. Obser rallies. She gets a job, her own apartment, and takes college courses — she’d wanted to go to college for a long time, but Billy wouldn’t allow it, and she had “no idea how to even begin to accomplish such things.”

“In just a few years,” the ending paragraph tells the reader, Ms. Obser “would have a new man” in her life. One whom she would marry and with whom she would have children. I would have welcomed more about this new man, the circumstances under which they met, and how he differed from Billy.

Not skittish about discussing the complications in her early marriage, Ms. Obser takes on the dicey subject of sexual dysfunction — a word unknown at the time — in a forthright and honest manner, not blaming herself or Billy, but fixing the end of her marriage to the notion that the “kids,” as she calls the two of them, were “perhaps too young and ill-informed to make a marriage work.”

Rita Plush is the author of “Lily Steps Out,” a novel, and “Alterations,” a book of short stories. She lives in Queens and East Hampton.

Eileen Obser lives in East Hampton.