The East Village of the early eighties; a divided Berlin; Brooklyn approaching the end of the millennium. Alternating between the various addresses of a restless life on two continents, A Lesser Day is a memoir in which part of the story takes place between the lines, untold.

In the freezing studios and working-class flats of Kreuzberg, we meet Sabine from across the bleak courtyard, a sturdy mother of four who disappears one day and whose adolescent daughters gradually grow wild; Martin, the charismatic boy with an alcoholic stepfather and his own hidden streak of cruelty; Ivo, a Croatian car mechanic who returns home to fight in the war as the landlady’s nine-year-old son sets about throwing rocks at the windowpanes of his workshop.

When the narrator travels to New York to attend her father’s funeral shortly after November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell, a period begins in which her hold on reality grows increasingly tenuous. Hiding away in her studio with her father’s journals, her paintings building up inch by inch in a fruitless attempt to come to terms with human mortality, she sets about deciphering her father’s encoded script. Addressing a continually shifting “you” in a search for emotional understanding initially directed at the author’s dead father and then merging into a blur of intimate others, A Lesser Day explores the mechanisms of memory and suppression in an era of political upheaval. Little escapes the author’s scrutinizing eye as she locates meaning in the passage of time as it inscribes itself into the myriad things around us: the mute, insentient witnesses of our everyday existence.

Andrea Scrima was born in New York City and studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany, where she lives and works. A Lesser Day is her first book.

Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Lingen Art Prize, and has exhibited internationally. She was the recipient of a literature fellowship from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts in Berlin, Germany, and won a 2007 National Hackney Literary Award for Sisters, a short story from an ongoing collection. In the winter of 2006/2007, A Lesser Day was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and in 2007 a finalist in the novella category of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society competition. In 2009 A Lesser Day was a semi-finalist in the same competition.

Praise For A Lesser Day:

“A narrative kept closer than a secret, oozing in slow, soft, whispers ... The work is delicate, yet naked and unapologetic, and our collective consciousness is greater for Spuyten Duyvil publishing this small, wondrous book.”
— The Brooklyn Rail

“The book’s mission is awareness, seeing ... in the end, it is hard not to cheer on a mind so intent on reclaiming meaning from the abandoned, the forgotten, and the mundane.”
— KGB Bar Lit

“A Lesser Day is poetic, disturbing, elegiac, visceral, and beautiful. Scrima paints vivid, detailed memories of places to evoke a web of intimate relationships that emerges gradually from a temporal fog into shocking, unforgettable clarity.”
— Kate Christensen

“A Lesser Day is a miraculous memoir intricately woven out of small wonders. Scrima’s is a world in which nothing is unobserved, nothing unnoticed; everything is fraught with meaning, however difficult it may be to discern. Few of us have any but the dimmest understanding of the lives we lead, moment to moment. The bravery and beauty of A Lesser Day is in the effort to understand, to make clear, to illuminate even the tiniest gesture. On the surface an elegy for a father’s death, it ultimately becomes a monument to the human struggle to survive, to remember, to understand, and to love.”
— Robert Goolrick

“The key passage to my understanding of the book A Lesser Day came about one-third of the way through, where the author, Andrea Scrima, writes about her practice of taking one photograph each day. ‘On some days I found nothing at all, having waited too long and the light having grown too dim, but I always took the picture anyway, even though the film couldn’t record much more than a murky blur: a lesser day.’ Of course, what she was capturing was still art, still something worth recording. Such is the case with the book itself. Telling the story of an artist making her way through the 1980s and dealing with loss, first in New York’s East Village, later in Berlin around the time of the fall of the wall. It could have been told from a different perspective, highlighting the tensions—internal and external—that drive her and those around her. Instead, it is told as a scrapbook of captured moments, some bursting with energy and conflict, like an image that cries out to be documented with a photo, and others more subdued and sketch-like, the so-called lesser days.

The constant is Scrima’s rich, descriptive prose. Told in short segments that are rarely more than a handful of pages, the story of A Lesser Day is one of aggregated detail. Much as you could take a stack of random photographs of a city and tell its story—though probably not the story most would tell—so, too, can you take seemingly random details about a life and weave a rich tapestry of story from its threads. It’s no surprise that Scrima is a visual artist. She conveys things that are vital to the story but comes at them from a different angle, giving the story a richness it would lack in a more conventional writer’s hands. Yet, despite these unique qualities, at its heart, A Lesser Day is a quintessentially American story of longing, loss and the search for identity.”
— Things I’d Rather Be Doing