Cover of The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

A candid memoir of love, art, and grief from a celebrated man of letters, United States poet laureate Donald Hall

In an intimate record of his twenty-three-year marriage to poet Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall recounts the rich pleasures and the unforeseen trials of their shared life. The couple made a home at their New England farmhouse, where they rejoiced in rituals of writing, gardening, caring for pets, and connecting with their rural community through friends and church. The Best Day the Worst Day presents a portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Between recollections of better times, Hall shares with readers the daily ordeal of Jane's dying through heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring storytelling.

Subject
biography
Setting
20th centuryUSA
Audience
adult
Length
medium · 272 pages
Form
poetry

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. The Mercy Papers Shares memoir, nonfiction, grief
  2. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me Shares memoir, nonfiction, poetry
  3. Paradise, Piece by Piece Shares memoir, nonfiction, poetry
  4. The Light of the World Shares memoir, nonfiction, poetry

“People who read The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Otherwise: New and Selected Poems
  2. The Jamestown Project
  3. Comfort: A Journey Through Grief
  4. Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son

“If you want more of the same (biography about writers), start with these.”

  1. The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets: A Self-Help Memoir
  2. Understanding Poetry (The Modern Scholar: Way with Words, Vol. 4)
  3. The Art of Writing: Lu Chi's Wen Fu
  4. Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems

“If it was the memoir that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: A Memoir
  2. The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence
  3. The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir
  4. The Virgin of Bennington

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir
  2. Saving Charlotte: A Mother and the Power of Intuition
  3. Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath
  4. Unremarried Widow