Author Diane Meier spent more than 30 years in the marketing and public relations industry, marketing luxury brands like Elizabeth Arden and Saks Fifth Avenue. At an age when she was comfortable and content with her life, new opportunities found her; she married the writer Frank Delaney, and, among other things, got to work on a novel. The result: The Season of Second Chances, which was published in March.

The setting is the academic and old house jungle of western Mass. Diane seems to be the kind of woman we could share risotto and espressokhaluatinis with at Carmelina's. I just dug in and found this delicious paragraph:

Amherst College has recruited me, rescuing my sorry ass from what had seemed a sealed and dismal fate. For reasons I won't question lest they wise up, they're paying me far more than I'm worth to move to the wilds of Massachusetts and work with one of the living legends of literature an criticism on developing new ways of sharing, if not teaching, the written word. This is far more than good fortune. This is like finding an unmarked envelope full of hundreds on the backseat of a crosstown bus. Before they figure out their mistake, I plan to be ensconced in some ivy-covered office, so wrapped in bureacratic tape that they won't be able to unravel my contract.

From the Book THE SEASON OF SECOND CHANCES by Diane Meier.  Copyright (c) 2010 by Diane Meier.  Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
It takes a keen eye to tell a false start from a dead end. I was finished with New York. I wanted out. I wanted somewhere else, anywhere else. I'd taught at Columbia for fifteen years and was, against all odds, a full professor. I'd published three books of poetry that few had read, not even my mother, and a biography of Margaret Chase Smith that no one read, not even me. How I'd managed to shred that fascinating woman—a clear-thinking, hard-talking, Yankee senator from Maine who had the guts and fortitude to run for president against Goldwater, Rockefeller and Stassen—into tiny bits of endless detail that added up to nothing, certainly nothing human, was almost an act of genius in itself.

I'd created a belabored pile of facts and figures, with no life whatsoever between the hardbound covers, wrapped in the dung-colored book jacket. I am a teacher—a good teacher. I like the year in, year out repetition of the curriculum. I like the fact that my job is to impart knowledge and enthusiasm, managed within an environment where the risk is minimal; what these kids do in the future with the information and the potential they may or may not display is not my problem.

I'm thoroughly entertained by them through the school year, and, for the most part, in the spring they move on. In September I get a whole new batch. It's redemption every fall. I have no arguments with this life. But New York is another story. Within the vaulted halls of Columbia I've been rubbed raw by the administration, frustrated by the exclusionary snobbery of academe and driven wild by the politics and the postures we're forced to assume to maintain any standing in the community. One is obliged to align oneself with positions that refuse to distinguish common sense from pageant, and God help you if your thoughts stray from that which is predigested and approved by committee to block any offense that might be taken by bullies masquerading as thin-skinned victims.

Should one suggest that banding homosexuals together and creating a "team" that demands recognition might, indeed, buy the team a bus, but that this bus will certainly not be in the fast lane—you will be ousted from the bosom of this academic community faster than you can say "Boys in the Band."
But go ahead, I dare you, because I am finished with this. I am packing my bags and moving away from this tempo of insistence that everyone step to an insipid dance or be labeled a rabid, right-wing reactionary.

I am moving away from an apartment that, while it has a heart-stopping view of the Hudson, if one hangs out the window, is roughly the size of the kitchen in the old Victorian I saw in Massachusetts. Four flights up when you are thirty-four may seem like an adventure. Four flights up when you are forty-eight seems an increasingly steep Matterhorn. Try carrying three bags of groceries up those stairs for decades, and you will find yourself eating only food that can be delivered.

I moved to New York when I was thirty-one, rather late to come to the press and whistle of the men and the subways, and perhaps too late to learn the wit and timing of real New Yorkers. I watched and listened in awe and delight, but I was never of their league. I was too quick for Saint Louis, that was obvious, but not ever-ready for old New York.
Since childhood, I'd dreamed of Manhattan and wished for a way out of Saint Louis, but I had no plan. When the opportunity to teach at Columbia appeared, I found the courage to leap from the Midwest, and I didn't look back. I left a pretty little starter house in Clayton, a teaching assignment at Washington University and a husband of four years, for the canyons and the peaks of New York's promise.

In my first apartment, shared with a secretary from Revlon and a stewardess from Delta, I read Kerouac, Salinger and Allen Ginsberg again and again, as I had in high school and college when the image of New York—and the woman I would become—fueled my fantasies. I kept reading and waiting for it all to take, but it never did.

There was a television commercial for Chemical Bank on the air when I first arrived, in which an attractive young woman purposefully made her way up Park Avenue. The camera caught her long stride to somewhere important. She ran a publishing company, I imagined. She designed jet engines. Her game farm in Africa bred white tigers. She commanded respect and used other people's money. The tagline to the commercial: "The New York Woman. When her needs are financial, her reaction is Chemical."

I opened an account at Chemical Bank within days of landing in Manhattan. I wanted to be that woman. Four months after my move, Chemical merged with Manufacturers Hanover and my bank became known as Manny Hanny. In New York, I was always just a tad late for the party.

Change rarely happens in doses large enough to choke you. Every day you swallow a little more and expect a little less. So I don't remember the day I stopped hoping I would become that self-assured woman who knew where the important people lunched. I don't know when I last believed that I would grow into someone Susan Sontag would choose to meet for an early supper and a movie we might then hack to pieces. I didn't know I'd given up. And yet, when opportunity beckoned to fly yet another coop, I jumped headlong into the gale that might carry me away from the niggling shame that I never would become That Woman whose reactions were Chemical.

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