Trove

Trove is the story of a woman whose life is up-ended when she begins an armchair treasure hunt—a search for $10,000 worth of gold coins buried in New York City, of all places—with a man who, as she points out, is not her husband. In this eloquent, hilarious, sharply realized memoir, Sandra A. Miller grapples with the regret and confusion that so often accompanies middle age, and the shame of craving something more when she has so much already.

In a very real way, Miller has spent her life hunting for buried treasure. As a child, she trained herself to find things: dropped hair clips, shiny bits of broken glass, discarded lighters. Looking to escape from her volatile parents and often-unhappy childhood, Miller found deeper meaning, and a good deal of hope, in each of these objects.

Now an adult and facing the loss of her last living parent—her mother who is at once cold, difficult, and wildly funny—Miller finds herself, as she so often did as a little girl, pressed against a wall of her own longing. Her search for gold, which soon becomes an obsession, forces her to dredge up painful pieces of her past, confront the true source of her sorrow, and finally discover what it is she has been looking for all these years.

“For so many of us, the obsessions of our future selves are sown into the wounds of our past. This is so clearly the case with Sandra Miller, an immensely gifted memoirist for whom the search for treasure has been, among other things, a lifelong search for beauty, for safety, for the revealing of secrets that may become a sanctuary for love. The prose here is spare yet lyrical, evocative and painstakingly honest, and Trove, itself, is a treasure.”
—ANDRE DUBUS III, New York Times bestselling author of House of Sand and Fog