In this collection of essays, Melita Schaum reflects on individual experience from the perspective of a wanderer mid-journey--a woman in her forties, a self-styled seeker who finds herself flaunting the system and bucking the odds. Contemplating marriage at age forty-four, trying to sort out the tangles of a midlife relationship, waffling about parenthood and freedom, she speaks to anyone who has tried to live an examined life or who has ever wondered whether happiness and unconventionality can coexist. Like their author, these essays roam the globe: Paris, Venice, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, an arts colony in the southern California desert, a snowbound cabin in the Catskills. They touch on themes of mortality and love, loss and recovery, and invite us to smile at the possibility of getting it right. A Sinner of Memory is about chance and choice, about wonder and catastrophe. It deals in the incongruous, but it amazes with unplanned congruities as well: pattern, composition, the pleasure of recurrence, as in music or poetry or love. Like life, these essays take us to unexpected places. They show that, whether the journey is across continents or in the heart, "we never land where it was we meant to land."