After all, I’m interviewing her regarding her newest book, Together Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, which documents her journey into self-discovery, a journey rooted in solitude and quietness. But there are many facets to this jewel of a lady, each reflecting life differently, yet part of the whole person.
Together Alone, released in early September, is a memoir derived from journals that Albert kept for several decades. Now age 69, she had packed mountains of events, feelings and descriptions into her daily diary, along with a lot of ordinary observations about life. But the commonality of these entries is the glue that binds her impressions into a cohesive story about her marriage, writing career, and the Hill Country homestead she loves and nourishes.

Changing the Direction of Her Career

Albert begins the recollections in 1985, after she left a successful career as a university professor and the first female vice president of Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University). Despite myriad academic achievements, Albert found the fast track of her work-life lacked personal satisfaction.
 Married at 18, Albert had three children in rapid succession. When she was 23, she read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. “It changed my life,” she says. She enrolled in college to polish her writing skills (Albert sold her first story at age 17 to a Sunday School magazine), but almost immediately decided to become a college professor. Her first marriage ended shortly before she earned her PhD at Berkeley in California. A brief second marriage and a third of longer tenure (but also unsuccessful) left her pondering some serious life questions. “I was lonely, empty and sad,” she says of that period.
In her mid-40s, Albert took a year’s leave of absence from the university “to find out about myself.” She began writing young adult novels “to see if I could” and continued while still at the university. Success in the genre provided the bridge that allowed her to walk away from her job (where she had managed a multi-million dollar budget and a 1,000-member staff) to become a freelance writer.
It’s a decision she has never regretted. “I had put too many fences around myself,” she says. “To me, being alone and free from responsibility was the greatest feeling in the world.”

Discovering the Sweetness of Solitude

She met Bill Albert shortly after leaving the university and discovered they shared many philosophies and dreams, including the desire to leave productive careers for the opportunity to work at home. Both relished solitary time to write and a longing to live connected to the land. “I’ve never asked Bill if he wondered whether I was a good bet as a marriage partner,” she writes in her book, “but I wouldn’t have blamed him for being skeptical when I said that fidelity—to a person, to a home place, to an undistinguished five-acre patch of ground—was something I hungered for… The deepest, truest part of me wanted to be rooted, to be connected, to stay put, to dwell.”
 Exploring that need is the underlying theme of Together Alone. Susan searches for ways to commit to the intimate partnership that defines marriage while still maintaining her separate identity. At Meadow Knoll, their rural patch of land nearBertram, the couple tackles duties such as growing a garden, tending livestock, and syncing chores with changing seasons. Albert has learned to work in tandem with her husband to create a homestead that fits their needs. “I was increasingly interested in simplifying life,” she says. At the same time they work on building their sustainable homestead and their relationship, she and Bill work together on a variety of writing projects—their means of earning a living.

Tuning in to the Rhythms of Nature

To illustrate their growing sense of partnership, Albert chronicles seasonal changes (“short springs, hot summers, glorious autumns and mild gray winters”) and relates those to the inevitable seasons of a marriage. “Whether it’s an hour or a day or a week or a month, we have found that the absence of one of us is a necessary part of being together,” she writes.
 Albert’s quest for self-discovery leads her to meditation—learning to sit or walk in solitude and with purpose. “Enlightenment seemed an impossible goal,” she writes, “but quiet was something I might just learn to manage.”
 She searched for a place that would allow uninterrupted introspection and contemplation and found it at Lebh Shomea, a silent monastic retreat near the south Texas village of Sarita. Albert loved the natural wilderness, the opportunity to listen to voices from within, and the intriguing stories surrounding the property.
 “Being alone gives me back myself. When I’m alone, apart, I’m not tempted to construct the self I think others would like to see,” she writes. Her favorite pastimes of reading, gardening and knitting provide time to be alone, yet each represents another aspect of self-expression.
 Albert incorporates lessons gleaned from those silent days into her ongoing life. She is at peace in Meadow Knoll (and their new property in New Mexico), in her more than two-decades marriage with Bill, and with herself as a creative, intellectual and entertaining writer.
 “For the rest of my life,” Albert says, “I hope to continue helping readers explore place and themselves through my writing.”