The Bliss of Solitude Author:Terra Ziporyn The Bliss of Solitude is a novel about sexual obsession, time’s transformation of memory, the gradual erosion of wonder, and the interplay between the external world and inner vision. Its heroine-narrator is Iris Cloud, a 43-year-old product of affluent Boston suburbs and an Ivy League education, who retreated to Vermont twenty years earlier to... more » hide an illegitimate pregnancy and to escape the expectations of her perfectionist parents. Now she runs a hand-knit sweater shop with her longtime lover Carolyn in a small resort town, clinging all the while to memories of her dreamy, awed, and restrained childhood in which she aspired to becoming a great artist and later a renowned physician. Life is tranquil enough, if passion-less, until one day Iris finds out that her 20-year-old daughter, Lydia plans to marry a questionable young man whom she has known for all of three weeks. Iris, stricken with guilt, realizes that she must step in and fulfill her long-neglected! maternal duties to Lydia, who had left Iris as a young teenager to live with her grandparents. Iris becomes convinced that part of this duty involves doing what she never bothered doing twenty years earlier: seeking out Lydia’s father, her college boyfriend, and telling him that he has a daughter, a daughter on the verge of marriage. Iris’s search for Jack--a would-be modern-day Michelangelo whose egotistic delusions of grandeur underlie his paradoxical attractiveness--erodes the already fading relationship between Iris and Carolyn and forces Iris to confront the portrait-like reminiscences of her past that in many ways are more alive to her than her current quest.« less