Baker finished her PhD and imagined she would end up on the tenure-track, but the career she'd trained for was no longer sustainable. GRACE PERIOD contains the essays she wrote to make sense of how her career went awry. She documents her transition out of academia and the rebuilding of a life beyond what she had prepared for.

"Grace Period is a novel about living with serious illness. Set in the cultural and natural riches of Sacramento and California's Central Valley, it is the story of two divorced, middle-aged cancer survivors, Marty Martinez and Miranda Mossi, who fall in love and resolve to make the most of whatever remains of their lives." "The story begins when Mexican American journalist Marty thinks his life can't get any worse: his beloved son has died of AIDS, his wife has divorced him and joined a cult, his daughter blames him for the disintegration of her parents' marriage, and he is estranged from his brothers and sisters. Then a chance medical examination reveals that he has prostate cancer." "Marty faces his bewildering new role as a cancer patient with awkward grit and touching desperation. He copes with fear and the painful, sometimes embarrassing, treatment of his disease, but instead of winding down his life he finds fresh purpose. He renews his faith in a Catholic Church as troubled as he is, and he meets Miranda, another cancer survivor, and falls in love. He brings new intensity to his newspaper career as he investigates far-reaching political scandals and pedophile priests. And he finds the courage to face his siblings and his angry daughter and to reunite the family."--BOOK JACKET.

Literary Nonfiction. According to Frances Burney, "Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace." Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, GRACE PERIOD: NOTEBOOKS, 1998-2007 would like to be something more interesting. Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and how they are used. Detailed descriptions of people eating, with enough tea to float away on. Advice on love. Prayers, curses, dreams. Moral maxims. Occasional rhymes. The special beauty of incomplete form depends on unachieved potential: because they are imperfect, fragments suggest a variety of perfections. They retain traces of their original context, as well as the charm of having escaped it. Kunin's grace period started in 1998, when he moved to Baltimore; in 2007, he was in California, where he lives now. During that time, in these little notebooks, he was learning how to write.

Cousins Sophia Grace and Rosie plan a princess tea party, with invitations and costumes.

From a review of Listeners at the Breathing Place: [Miranda's] "best is breathtaking. Beyond the words, whatever is is light. A poet who can make us know, with this intensity, what we may do when words reach into silence, even the silences between the stars, has begun to tell us of the place for love. Certainly we can want no better."--Michael Heffernan, Poetry

The author recounts her childhood in late-nineteenth-century Nebraska, describes her adult life on a ranch, and discusses her lifelong interest in making quilts