In 1988, Claire Robson started writing a novel about her mother. In the way that writing will, the book took its own course and became as much, or more, about Robson herself. Fifteen years and 39 rejections later, it was published as the memoir "Love in Good Time."

The book ends with the death of Robson's mother in Glenburn, England, where Robson grew up, but that was really the beginning, she says. Her mother's death "prompted a huge change in my life," Robson says. In her still decidedly British accent, she describes it as "a big kick up the jaxie."

In addition to starting the book, Robson quit her job, fell in love, moved to the U.S. and resolved to never live again in a way that was not true to herself.

"Once I left England," she says, "I vowed I was never going to hide who I am."

For the first few years she lived in Boston, Robson was a virtual recluse, she says, as she worked on the memoir and painted houses to earn a living.

"I needed to write most of the book in isolation," she says. "Now, the first thing I say is join a group if you are interested in writing, but I had to find my voice."

Since then, Robson has definitely come out of isolation. Thirteen years ago, she started New Voices, a monthly venue for women to read their prose and poetry. She also has led a writing group for ten years in Boston called Mrs. Crull's Harem Girls. She leads another group, Women of Words, aka WOW, in Ashland, New Hampshire, where she moved several years ago when her partner took a teaching position at Plymouth State University.

"My forte as a teacher is revision," says Robson. "The work informs you, surprises you, demands that you see it again. I am good at seeing things that haven't come through yet, at dragging the writer kicking and screaming into the daylight."

Meanwhile, "Love in Good Time" went through several drafts and rejections. Robson put it away and ignored it for about four years as she wrote poetry and short fiction. It came out again – "I dug it out and blew the dust off," she says – after she met Edmund White, "an icon in the field of gay memoir." White liked her work and eventually wrote a blurb for the book.

After more revisions and negotiations with publishers, the memoir was published in September 2003 by Michigan State University Press.

Since February, Robson has been on a round of book readings. She is reading at all the major independent book stores on the East Coast, she says, including stores in Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Conn.; Atlanta, Ga.; New York City; Boston; Philadelphia; and Chapel Hill, N.C.

Some of the readings that she remembers most, though, are in small communities. Like the one to six elderly ladies at the library in Colebrook, NH, located on the Canadian border. "I resolved not to come out," Robson says, "to read only the safe stuff. But then I thought, 'the theme of the damn book is you can't change your nature.' Those people loved it. They rocked!"

Going back to "Love in Good Time," both in revising it and now reading selections from it, has been an interesting experience for Robson. Her writing style has developed. A recent story published in North American Review, "The Rabbit's List," she describes as "an exciting departure, sharply satirical, more ruthless and clinical, like a scalpel."

Revising her memoir, which is warm and loving, required her to stop that development for a time, she says. And at one point, she felt "so tired of writing about my life, I wanted to invent another life."

Now that the memoir is published, however, she finds she is loving reading from it. And she can't help but enjoy the fact that, as a first time book author published by a small, academic press, she is getting some pretty good reviews, including from such heavy hitters as Publishers Weekly:

"A born raconteur, Robson makes the prosaic immensely engaging. With a flair for just the right turn of phrase to invoke an era or a moment, she deftly combines the wry wit of hindsight with the poignancy of recollection. Her memoir evokes the coming-of-age many feminists of Robson's era experienced…Intuitive, charming and rife with the conflict of past and present, this memoir's tales will resonate with many women."

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