LIFE IN A DAY, by Doris Grumbach; Beacon Press, Boston, 1996; 140 pages; $17; hardcover.

Doris Grumbach, who is 78 and has been writing books for 17 years, doesn’t want to smile. It’s not really that she has anything against smiling, she tells a photographer taking her picture. It’s just not her way. She’s not a smiler.

Sometimes there is a smile when she talks about her children and grandchildren, or about her lifelong love of swimming. But it is, in fact, more of a mischievous grin that appears when Grumbach tells a story about trying to maintain a private life once her books and reviews of her books have appeared in print.

Grumbach says people have come to Sargentville looking for her at Wayward Books, a rare books store run by her partner, Sybil Pike. Once when a hopeful reader came to the front door of the house that Grumbach and Pike share, which is next to the bookstore, Grumbach came head-on with an unwanted intrusion. “Are you Doris Grumbach?” the person asked. “No,” Grumbach responded. “I’m Sybil Pike.” And shut the door.

That’s the kind of story that animates Grumbach. She admits that she is given to pessimism and solitariness, and her newest memoir, “Life in a Day,” records those signature moods. For that, Grumbach makes no apologies.

Nor should she, says Alan Cheuse, book commentator for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and writing teacher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

“I don’t see Doris as a curmudgeon,” says Cheuse, who has done radio reviews of Grumbach’s books. “She’s just honest and it may well be that when you get to a certain age, you decide you don’t have to put on your manners as much as you used to. She holds very strong opinions, but we all do. It’s just that most of the time we don’t exercise them. As she grows older, she grows more honest, which is what I hope all of us would do.”

In September, Grumbach traveled to Boston to accept a Presidential Award for lifetime contribution to arts and letters from the New England Booksellers Association. In her acceptance speech, she told the audience that she had spent only a seventh of her life writing books and so didn’t exactly qualify for this particular award.

She thanked the group, nonetheless, and added that she would regard the award as a tribute “not to a lifetime, but to old age, to works produced in a period of decrepitude, when hearing, sight, memory, and energy are on a steep decline, a time of small triumphs of will over physical dimunition.”

Grumbach has split the $1,000 award among libraries in Blue Hill, Brooklin and Sargentville. “In communities as isolated as ours, the public library is essential,” says the writer, a regular library user. “They are far better for learning than the Internet.”

In her last memoir, “Fifty Days of Solitude,” Grumbach recorded her thoughts about old age and about being alone during a self-imposed winter retreat from society. In the latest memoir, her fourth one, Grumbach distills the time and place into one day in the life of a 77-year-old writer in a small coastal town in Maine. It is her life, she says, and if it isn’t based on one day in particular, it authentically represents a typical day in her life.

There are three constants in her latest book, she says: her procrastination with writing projects, a devotion to prayer and the intrusion of the mundane upon her inner world. She also records trepidation about reviews, her constant reading habits (she has several book stations around the house) and a desire simply to be left alone.

“It’s not the book of a social woman,” she says of “Life in a Day.” “Maine has made me hermitic. It seems to me — this sounds very odd — the life that you lead in your mind — with your eyes and your ears in one place — serves you well in old age.”

This is her last memoir, says Grumbach, who also has written seven novels and won’t discuss her latest writing project.

“I think I’ve remembered and done as much with memory as I want to do,” she says. “I know because I had trouble getting this one to the publisher. May Sarton had just died and there was a long silence. I had a feeling that this one [‘Life in a Day’] was solipsistic and I thought, `Enough of this solipsism.’ ”

Although Grumbach knows her memoirs are not journals in the style of May Sarton’s books, others see Grumbach as the heir apparent to Sarton’s status as Maine’s senior writer.

Elaine Ford, a professor of creating writing and literature at the University of Maine, met Grumbach at Yaddo, the artist colony near Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the early 1980s and has read several of her books.

“I think she has probably inherited May’s reputation in Maine as being the central literary light of that generation,” says Ford, who lives in Milbridge. “I greatly admire the meticulous attention she gives to language. She’s incapable of writing a bad sentence or even an indifferent sentence. I admire that very much because I think a lot of writing getting published these days is pretty sloppy. She takes enormous care of the language.”

That “language” is, indeed, a ubiquitous part of Grumbach’s life. The rooms of her seaside house are stacked with books, and every conversation seems to make at least one reference to a poet or a novelist. While discussing her life — her four grown children, her writing projects, her sensitivity to growing older — Grumbach sits in a comfortable chair in the house’s newly constructed library, which consists primarily of books of fiction.

It seems a propos of a life spent in literary pursuits — as contributing editor of the New Republic, nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, book reviewer for NPR, professor of literature at American University, bookstore owner, novelist and memoirist — that Grumbach should be surrounded by a roomful of books and living next door to a bookstore.

“When you’re at the last place you’ll be, as I suspect I am, accumulation makes for warmer walls,” says Grumbach, who has lived in Maine for seven years. “You have a sense of furnishing, of keeping your head furnished.”

She may not be smiling about any of this, but there is a clear sense that this writer has a daily and full writing life that sustains her and secures her spot among Maine’s literary women.

Excerpt from ‘Life in a Day’

“I have been five hours getting to the computer, longer than is common for me. True, I often do everything I can think of to delay the moment of arrival, but today there seems to be more resistance to getting down to work than usual. Outside it is warm and lovely. There are bright-yellow finches at the feeder, and I am tempted to walk down to the pebbled beach at the end of the meadow. A warm-weather delaying tactic. At this moment it seems I ought to take a most important jaunt to see if anything of interest has washed up in the sea wrack.

“Once, years ago on our beach, we found a whole china soap dish (I think it was, but it may have been a butter dish), in which we now store a motley collection of keys, bag twisters and coins. No one to whom we show it will believe we found it where we did and in that perfect, unchipped condition. So encouraged, we now go down often to search, finding of course only broken pieces of crockery among the mounds of broken glass. Sybil rejects these bits; she is hoping to find enough matching shards to complete a full, twelve-piece table setting.

“I take my cane and walk to the shore.”

— From “Life in a Day” by Doris Grumbach