Facing his sixty-forth winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster decides to write a journal as he sees himself aging in ways he never imagined. Compellingly written, and with dreamlike logic and urgency, the autobiographical fragments and meditations produce an extraordinary mosaic of a life. Weaving together vividly detailed stories, Auster illuminates how each small incident comes to signify a whole. Also, there are two recurring moments: one of bodily terror -- his panic attack following his mother's death in 2002; the other of joy -- his experience watching a dance piece in 1978 which releases him from writer's block just prior to his father's death. It was his father's death that began his first equally unconvential and internationally celebrated memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published thirty years ago. Now, Auster has included an unforgettable portrait of his mother. Winter Journal is a surprising and moving meditation on time, the body, the weight of memory, a long and fulfilling marriage (with author Siri Hustvedt), and language itself by one of the most interesting and elegant writers writing today, and one with a devoted following.

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: At nearly 64, one of our greatest modern writers is feeling his age. In his quietly transfixing new memoir, Winter Journal, Paul Auster meditates on what it means for his mind, body, and creativity to experience the unforgiving passage of time. This should be--and is--an intensely personal chronicle, but Auster makes the journey equally ours by inviting us into its unfolding. "No doubt you are a flawed and wounded person," he cautions, and suddenly you are. You are the player in this story: running away from your pregnant mother in a department store; learning to wrangle your adolescent hormones; taking an "inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face"; marveling at the beauty of your wife as she sleeps; moving in and out of 21 homes, recalling their addresses and aesthetics in astonishing detail. "Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body," Auster notes. With Winter Journal, he reminds us that it is also the joyful, then melancholy, then reluctantly accepting soundtrack of our full and finite lives. --Mia Lipman