Books

You can find Bette Ann’s books at IndieBound, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. You can also order through your local bookstore. Click a title to learn more.

Three Legs in the Evening – Available May 2023

Three Legs in the Evening comes from the Sphinx’s riddle in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus is asked what creature walks on all fours in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and three in the evening. The answer, which Oedipus gets right, is Man, who crawls as a baby, walks upright as a man, and leans on a cane in his old age. Received wisdom, in other words, can be unreliable. Enter the story of Sally B, an over-sixty widow about to retire from her successful greeting card business in the aftermath of 9/11. She has a devoted family who relies on her wit and wisdom. But suddenly all hell breaks loose — her best friend dies, she falls into an open grave and she breaks her ankle. As this is happening, her children’s marital lives are unraveling, her grandchildren are in turmoil, and a man she has known from a time before comes back in her life. Taking place over a year, this is a story of love in a time of horror, as well as the profound and surprising ways in which everything Sally thought she knew changes. Sexy, funny and heart-wrenching, and much like Kent Haruf’s Our Souls At Night, Three Legs in the Evening speaks about people running out of steam, running out of time, and finding solace and wisdom even in the finality of all that. A life carefully built can crumble in a moment, but what happens then? Sally B. plays it out as best she can.

Finishing Up: On Aging and Ageism

To age is human; we reach majority, come into maturity, celebrate milestones, light candles for every passing year, until we get old. And then we turn away and deny it, decry it. Why? This narrative study explores the incomprehensible fact of ageism and what it feels like to live through it.

Finishing Up: On Aging and Ageism is a call to action, for all of us to reckon with our own aging by continuing to be in the world, to continue doing what we love, and to continue doing what we can to break down the bars of the cultural cages of ageism. To me, that also means to be on the look-out for Moskowitz’s next book. (From foreword by Judith Pearl Summerfield)

Reading the Signs

The novel, Reading the Signs is a gripping mystery about betrayal and love, truth and lies, abuse and power, sound and silence. At the same time it is a meta-mystery about language in language, an enactment of what Virginia Woolf called the “Danger and difficulty of words.” How can we know and unknow something at the same time? When does the unsaid become as apparent as the said? Is it possible to hold knowledge off long enough for the words about it to change, or at least cool down? What are we to do when words push their way past our own determination not to speak them? Taking place in a small beach town on Long Island, New York, Sylvie Fried, an expert reading teacher, comes up against challenges in her personal life and in the work she does in Rose Elementary School and her customary confidence is suddenly not there, yet finding solutions may be a matter of life and death.

Leaving Barney

This bookstore mystery is also the mystery about how two people who didn’t seem to have suited each other at all, fell in love and how that love endured.

From Publishers Weekly

This appealing first novel begins with the title character’s accidental death. When Barney Goodman is killed by a collapsing bookshelf, he leaves a widow, Tessie, and a bookstore in a declining Bronx neighborhood. He also leaves a number of mysteries to be unraveled: What did Barney do with the proceeds from the life-insurance policy he converted to cash months earlier? Who is the elusive M. H. Ross, who periodically writes Tessie expressing an interest in buying the bookstore, yet never shows his face? On top of these problems, Tessie must deal with hoodlums who victimize old people in her neighborhood and a daughter whose marriage is in shambles. Most of all, she must deal with her own doubts about the tempestuous marriage she and her husband shared. Were all her years with Barney wasted? Could she have done better for herself? In due course, the feisty widow meets all her challenges, and this thoughtful narrative ends on a pleasant, upbeat note.

Do I Know You?

Do I Know You? is the account of one woman’s slide into advanced senility. Mary Solomon moved to Florida after her husband died, and much to the surprise of her to grown daughters, created a new life for herself in a seaside condominium. Ten happy years followed, then slowly the decline began – stale cracker in an empty refrigerator, once immaculate floors turned sticky, unpaid bills, forgetfulness. Bette Moskowitz has created an unforgettable portrait of an ordinary woman at the end of her life. She asks questions many readers will eventually have to confront. How can one grow old with dignity? How can one become a parent to one’s parent? Moskowitz probes the heart of our culture – one that refuses to comprehend the aging process.

A Room at the End of the Hall

In this first person narrative, Bette Ann Moskowitz tells what it is like to be a volunteer long-term care ombudsman, and how, with thirty-six hours of training, she entered the unfamiliar world of a nursing home to advocate for its almost-three hundred residents. She brings the reader along as she learns the ropes, makes mistakes and meets tragic and beautiful people struggling for their lives. When she becomes assistant coordinator of the program, she gets an even broader view of institutional life, advocacy, and old age. Problems are big and small: a man discharged for having a sexual relationship with a fellow resident; residents not getting evening snacks; an intelligent resident with mental health problems fighting to be a partner in her own care. Author of DO I KNOW YOU? A Family’s Journey Through Aging and Alzheimer’s, Moskowitz says advocating for the old and disabled in long-term care can be a transgressive act. “We often oppose the authorities by standing up for the one with two different shoes against the Suits. Sometimes we don’t know enough. We have access, but little power. Yet, an ombudsman may be the only thing standing between the resident and disaster.” In addition to shedding light on this unheralded and important volunteer health care worker, THE ROOM AT THE END OF THE HALL raises questions about how America and Americans go about the business of old age, and how old age itself is changing as the baby boomer generation enters it. Bette Ann Moskowitz is a writer, editor and teacher, whose subject is often, but not always, aging.

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