And Do Remember Me (1992)

In And Do Remember Me, Golden tells the story of two Southern women who pass through the civil rights movement in Mississippi, the New York theater scene, and academic life in Washington. Jesse Foster and Macon Fields move from the violence of the '60s to the greed of the '80s and experience a mess of private grief along the way, including incest, rape, alcoholism, infertility, and breast cancer. Cramming three decades of trouble and uplift into fewer than 200 pages, Golden sometimes resorts to pop-novel shorthand. But ultimately her heroines arrive at a middle-aged wisdom that's both convincing and comforting. B+