IN THE KEY OF NEW YORK CITY

A transplant to Manhattan from North Carolina reflects on the blessings and bothers of living in the impersonal metropolis.

In her latest, McClanahan, a teacher in the Queen’s University MFA program and a winner of two Pushcart Prizes, explores many facets of the New York City experience, among other topics. She writes about how she tried to import some Southern hospitality and meet her neighbors with some home-baked cookies only to discover that her gesture had been taken as a gross invasion of privacy. Yet she learned to navigate her way: with strangers on a park bench, with the removal of a squirrel from her apartment, with a grieving city following 9/11. In “Present Tense,” the author ruminates on infidelities, including that of her second husband, Donald, about midway through its 25-year (and counting) span. The author also examines her place in the other position, as the mistress of a married man who was not going to leave his family. “Books tell us it takes about six months for the initial passion of an affair to cool,” writes McClanahan. “It took the man with the children a little more than six months; Donald, a bit less.” Since the preceding pieces are comparatively lighthearted snapshots of life in the big city, it’s even more powerful when what follows is an essay dealing with her cancer prognosis, surgery, and recovery. In “Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy,” McClanahan clearly demonstrates how quickly things can change and become a matter of life and death in the wake of what had seemed like a routine colonoscopy. In the penultimate essay, “Our Towns,” the author deftly connects the home that formed her with the one she has adopted. Discussing her viewing of a revival of Our Town featuring “Paul Newman’s first return to Broadway in nearly forty years,” she conjures memories of the play everyone remembered from high school and the towns where they had first experienced it.

A pleasing memoir/essay collection.