The Time Being

Description

From Mary Meigs, the celebrated author of In the Company of Strangers, comes an autobiographical novel, The Time Being. An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia. With a lifetime of relationships already behind them, the two women approach each other cautiously, each filled with the rekindled fire of innocent passion, constrained by their gathered clouds of experience. In this isolated and primeval land, a performance of ancient aboriginal ritual and drama draws the lovers into the elemental world of "the dream time," the still point around which their relationship begins to turn. This is an exquisite love story unlike any other, written in retrospect with a lovely, clear heart, and in the full light of day.

Mary Meigs Born in Philadelphia, writer and painter Mary Meigs wrote her first novel, Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, at the age of 60. For the next two decades, Meigs chronicled her extraordinary life as a writer, a painter, an actress, a social activist and a lesbian feminist. In 1988, Meigs played herself in the critically acclaimed film The Company of Strangers (U.S. release title: Strangers in Good Company; French title: Le Fabuleux gang des sept [1990]), about eight women on a bus tour who are stranded in isolated countryside when the bus breaks down. In the Company of Strangers (1991) followed, a fascinating work documenting her experience during the production of the film. Mary Meigs died in 2002 at the age of 85, shortly before the completion of Beyond Recall.

"The reader is left with an elaboration of the impulse towards, and the slow collapse of, a love affair ... Meigs has also left us in the company of two unforgettable women."