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“Memory is full of riches, grief, and joy." 

At Eighty Two: a journal is the final and eighth journal of poet and writer May Sarton. Known mainly for her erotic lesbian poetry, Sarton published her first personal journal at age 15, but the next journal she published was from 1959 at the age of 47. By her journal Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year, she had to use a tape recorder because she was physically unable to write. At Eighty Two covers July 1993-August 1994 and was published a year after her death. In it, she wrote about her gratitude for life and her struggles with aging. She writes candidly of the frustrations of physical frailty in the wake of a stroke and up-keeping her large Maine house, her anxieties towards feeling unaccepted by literary establishment,  but also her gratitude for heartfelt letters from readers, visits with friends, and her cat Pierrot.