A Reckoning

When Laura Spelman, sixty, an editor at a Boston publishing house, learns that she has cancer and will not get well, her one wish is that she be allowed to die in her own way. She looks on this last illness as a journey during which she must reckon up he life - give up the nonessentials and concentrate on what she calls "the real connections." As the year unfolds, Laura realizes that for her the most significant connections have been - and are - with women: her brilliant and devastating mother, a difficult daughter, a lesbian writer she is advising, and most of all a woman friend she knew when was young.