Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

What a beautiful novel....simple, thoughtful, and quiet, but powerful. The writing is wonderful and the main character is so interesting, in a simple way.
Rebecca Winter is an artist on the other side of her career. She's 60, divorced, in financial straights and making changes in her life....and not dealing too well with those changes. Her parents are both alive, one with Alzheimer's and in a nursing home, and the other (her father) is frail and living with a housekeeper. Rebecca has to make payments on both of those places, and pay for her own UWS apartment, but she's having a hard time making ends meet. She comes up with a plan to rent out her fancy apartment and move to a cottage upstate.
The first night there she hears an animal in the attic - she doesn't know it's an animal until Jim Bates, the roofer, comes and tells her and sets a trap for it.
Rebecca is the once famous artist who created "Still Life with Bread Crumbs" and other domestic works of photographic art.  She is still somewhat of a legend, but clearly the pinnacle of her career is past. But read on, and see how she reinvents her life and figures herself out in her later years.
I loved the writing and the tone of the book. Anna Quindlen is one of my favorite authors and this is a new departure from her former fictional works.