Crack in the Door

Thomas Hardy wrote: “Some women only need an emergency to make them fit for one.” In Windfall, her tough but tender memoir, Roberta Swann manifests just that, from the details of her mother’s long decline to the horrors of a night in jail. Past meets present. Summers at a nudist colony are recalled as well as the co-founding on the American Jazz Orchestra. Phillip Lopate calls this collection “smart, sassy, self-aware, and funny as all get-out,” while Maura Stanton says that Roberta Swann’s “limpid prose” about her mother’s death is “as stunning as Roland Barthes’ Journal de Deuil.”