Excerpt from While I Was Gone by Sue Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Here's what else I knew: I was no longer sure exactly what color my hair would be if I didn't regularly rinse it a color called Silver Ash. I was about an inch shorter than I'd been in youth, and had earned at least that much more waistline as my body had compressed. I had arthritis in my hips, and it was starting a little in my back.

And I was lucky, I knew this, too. There was no cancer in my family, there were no blood pressure or cholesterol problems. Though my father had died when I was small, it had been an accident of nature--a quick, brutal case of hepatitis. No, I was a good specimen, from good stock. My mother, eighty, still worked part time as a secretary, typing articles and papers for two or three retired professors who'd known her since she was a young woman. She still lived by herself in the house where I'd grown up--though I suppose she was technically not alone, since she rented rooms to students at the university, and I suspected that more and more they did the work of keeping the house up. Still, she managed it all. She managed it well, she kept herself going through the long Maine winters.

Thinking of her, looking at myself, I wondered if she'd ever felt this sense of dislocation from her past, from her present, from her own reflection in the mirror. This empty unease. And then I smiled at myself, remembering her answer to questions of this nature. "Now, why would I bother to do that?" she'd say. She wouldn't stop what she was doing, she wouldn't turn to look at the eight-year-old, or ten-year-old, or thirteen-year-old girl who stood next to her, asking. She wouldn't wonder where the question had come from or what its deeper meaning was. She'd slap the sifter to loose the flour, she'd slam the iron down on the shirt under attack, she'd rat-tat-tat even harder on the typewriter and violently fling the return across. "Now, why would I bother to do that?"

"Just 'cause, Ma," I said out loud now. And then I turned and said it to the dogs, who'd gathered in a circle behind me and were staring up, pondering my immobility. "Just 'cause, guys and gals." Their tails thudded the floor. The little one, Shorty, growled in pleasure just at being spoken to. I felt somehow comforted. This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version's vanishing.

Ah, well, it had vanished, hadn't it? As surely as the rooms upstairs stood empty and neat in the dark.

I washed my face and put on fresh makeup. Daniel came back from the barn and we began to move around the kitchen, making dinner. He hadn't been able to reach Mortie, but he'd talked to everyone else he needed to talk to. Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard--the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay.

Excerpted from While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. Copyright© 1999 by Sue Miller. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.