In Bohemia

The day her fianc died suddenly of a heart attack, Katie Swenson retreated to Bohemia, the third-floor loft that the couple had renovated in their home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and began to write. A visceral account of grief and the profound kindness that resonates around it, this is also the story of her hundred-year-old house, named the Scarab after the Egyptian symbol for rebirth, and the two courageous women who built it a century earlierWellesley College professors Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful, and her partner Katharine Coman. Parallel lives unfold in the magical Bohemia, where Coman died, where Bates mourned, and where Swenson wrote and wrote through that first searing year, held up by their spirits. Told with rare emotional power, In Bohemia is a meditation on love, family, and community, and inspires us to be our best selves.