Overview
Writer and editor Edie Clark was not expecting love to enter her life in the form of a young carpenter named Paul Bolton. She was facing the realities of a failing marriage, while Paul was a shy, gentle but sometimes troubled man. Yet together they nurtured a love and built a married life as beautiful and enduring as the places Paul restored, the cabinets he crafted. And in the time they shared, they would find extraordinary grace and strength, and see their lives transformed by the power of love. The Place He Made follows in the distinguished tradition of Death Be Not Proud as one of the most unforgettable personal memoirs of love and loss in many years.The Place He Made has been reissued by popular demand and updated with an all-new chapter, written nearly twenty years after Paul's death, giving perspective to this enduring story.
Although an unlikely couple, New England writer and editor Edie Clark and her husband, Paul, had a true marriage of the spirit. Until tragedy struck, and Paul became fatally ill. Then began their mutual struggle to hold fast to what they had together, while learning to let go at the same time.
Synopsis
Writer and editor Edie Clark was not expecting love to enter her life in the form of a young carpenter named Paul Bolton. She was facing the realities of a failing marriage, while Paul was a shy, gentle but sometimes troubled man. Yet together they nurtured a love and built a married life as beautiful and enduring as the places Paul restored, the cabinets he crafted. And in the time they shared, they would find extraordinary grace and strength, and see their lives transformed by the power of love. The Place He Made follows in the distinguished tradition of Death Be Not Proud as one of the most unforgettable personal memoirs of love and loss in many years.
The Place He Made has been reissued by popular demand and updated with an all-new chapter, written nearly twenty years after Paul's death, giving perspective to this enduring story.
Publishers Weekly
Edie met Paul Clark, a sheltered New Englander who still lived with his father, when he began working for her husband as a carpenter. In evocative prose Edie, a writer for Yankee Magazine, describes how their friendship blossomed into love as her own marriage was failing. Although Paul had a history of mental problems and was so reclusive that he rarely left his small New Hampshire town, his gentleness, craftmanship and love of nature struck a responsive chord in Edie. After she divorced, Edie and Paul married and had a year of happiness before Paul was diagnosed with a fatal form of cancer. Edie details their two years together as Paul underwent painful and unsuccessful treatments, and she describes her own battle with uterine cancer. Throughout their struggle, the couple hung on to their mutual love and wrested as much happiness as possible for themselves by building a new house and delighting in the natural beauty that surrounded them. Paul died in 1989, and this memoir is a hymn to their unusual love story. 40,000 first printing; first serial to Yankee Magazine; author tour. (May)