LIFE IN A DAY. <i> By Doris Grumbach. (Beacon: 140 pp., $17)</i>

In her new memoir, Doris Grumbach examines that solitary improvisation, a day in the life of a writer. The framework is simple: Grumbach records one of her typical 18-hour days, from waking in the bed of her Maine home at dawn to her retreat to that bed the same night. The sole purpose of this day (and of Grumbach’s days in general) is to accomplish some work, by which she means the modest progress of a page or two. But the delight of “Life In a Day” is that, even in the face of this reasonable goal, the author is constantly, and entertainingly, waylaid.

Grumbach is a self-described minimalist and it is precisely this sensibility that keeps “Life In a Day” from being a flurry of random observations. Despite the fact that this memoir has the anecdotal quality of a journal, there is nothing casual about its net effect. The author is rigorously selective: One senses the degree to which superfluous events and trains of thought were edited from the text, each brief passage shorn of excess. Certain themes--literary friendships, connection to the Maine landscape, a love of travel and Grumbach’s relationship with her partner, Sybil--are reiterated, lending cohesiveness to the parts that comprise the whole. One of the most stirring of these themes is age; Grumbach’s attitude toward it is neither romantic nor self-pitying. With a distinct lack of didacticism (Grumbach insists that no book on the subject has ever made writing easier for her), she documents that arduous privacy that is so often aggrandized as “The Writer’s Life.”

BERNARD COOPER will participate in the panel “Art of the Memoir” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Sunday, April 20, 1:30 p.m.