Catherine Goldhammer Still Life with Chickens: Starting Over in a House

Still Life with Chickens: Starting Over in a House by the Sea

Catherine Goldhammer

Plume, May 2007, $12.00

ISBN: 0452288487

In her fifties and beginning to think of what she will do during her golden years, Catherine Goldhammer instead finds herself obtaining a divorce albeit an amiable one from her husband. The immediate impact is being economically poorer and raising their twelve years old daughter by herself. She relocates from affluent suburbia with her offspring to a fixer upper New England cottage that came with six two-day old chicks. Catherine bought the house and the chicks with the former for her and the latter to occupy her daughter. This terrific insightful memoir reflects the year she adjusted all cylinders of her life starting with raising the chickens and renovating a dump that the two female Goldhammers loosely called home. In the process she also repaired a broken psyche. Her fears especially for her daughter, her joy over minuscule successes, and her euphoria that the hard work starting with the bribery chickens that saved her soul make for inspired reading.

Harriet Klausner