Story Circle Network

Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide

May 2005

Light Years: A Memoir
Le Anne Schreiber

In 1984, the New York Times Book Review deputy editor Le Anne Schreiber chucked her job and the fast life in Manhattan for an old house on an acre of land in a tiny town in upstate New York. There, she learned to fly fish, and along the way, she outmaneuvered a huge corporation that was dumping sludge near the unspoiled trout stream where she had promised to scatter her dying father's ashes...

  1. Each of the eight chapters in Light Years is an essay and able to stand alone. Which essay/chapter did you like best? Why?

  2. On p. 101, Schreiber leaves for college in Texas "knowing she might never return to her childhood home in Illinois except as a visitor." She feels no regret for "home would always be my parents, but it had never really been that house."

    Later, on p. 106, after buying her own home in upstate NY, she says, "I was aware that whenever I left New York to join my parents, I said I was flying 'home,' and that whenever I returned to New York, I also said I was flying home. In neither direction did home mean a structure."

    Where is home for you? What makes it home?

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