Abigail Trafford masterfully braids two worlds: the culture and history of an accomplished East Coast family well anchored in time and place, and the life of an adventurous journalist navigating her way through new territories—professional and personal in diverse locales including Paris, Washington, D.C., Houston and Australia’s Northern Territory.
Spirited, clear-eyed, funny and astute, Trafford explores a topsy-turvy time when journalism was a male bastion and the rules of marriage were in flux. Blessed with the secure moorings of a multigenerational family that more than a century ago put down roots on a remote island in Maine, she addresses “downward mobility” and the tragedies that marked her childhood. Her solution was to make her own way. Shrewdly, she had the good sense to do so as a “bolter with roots”—the further she bolted into her career and her own family, the more important the island and her extended family became—“object permanence” in action.
In Trafford’s case, “bolting” was no timid leap. Early in her career at The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report, she was part of what she refers to as the “First-and-Only generation: first and only women doing the same job as male colleagues.”
High Time—as in “It’s high time I made sense of life”—is an engaging and inspiring guide to crafting a life and a testament to the enduring power of love and place.
Abigail Trafford is an author, journalist and public speaker. She wrote the My Time column for The Washington Post, and has been a commentator on Washington Post Radio and a syndicated columnist with Universal Press Syndicate. As the Post’s mhealth editor, she covered a range of stories from health care politics, gene science and the treatment of mental disorders to the sociology of marriage and family and the changing roles of men and women. She is the author of three previous books: My Time, As Time Goes By and Crazy Time. For the past decade, Trafford has focused on the positive impact of the longevity revolution, thanks to the increase in “health span” that offers new opportunities in love and work for older Americans. She lives in Boston and Vinalhaven, Maine.
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