Books
Sorry I Was Gone
Illustrated Lyric Memoir
Self-Published, 2021
With original illustrations taken from Grover’s collection of art, to-do lists, and doctors’ notes, Sorry I Was Gone exposes to absurdity the arbitrary metrics by which we judge our lives. In essays on reality TV, personality tests and final exams, Grover asks: what if the worst thing that ever happened to you was also the funniest?
The End of My Career
Memoir
Perfect Day Publishing, 2016
Whether cleaning houses or looking for love, Martha Grover peels back the surfaces of ordinary moments and reveals a life both hilarious and traumatic. The End of My Career sees Grover living with her parents again as she enters her late thirties, reconciling the pleasures and perils of being female, chronically ill, and subsisting on menial labor at the edge of an increasingly unaffordable city. Desperate for stable work, she gets hired as a state-sanctioned private investigator looking into shady workers’ comp claims—even while she herself fights in court for her own disability settlement. Angry and heartbroken, brimming with the outrageous contradictions of the modern world, The End of My Career embodies the comic nightmare of our times.
One More for the People
Memoir
Perfect Day Publishing, 2011
Playful, wry, and conversational, One More for the People chronicles three generations in the life of the Grover family. As these idiosyncratic characters reluctantly confront adulthood, one Grover is always there to take notes. But after she's diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal disease (whose 81 symptoms include dramatic changes to her appearance, not to mention the dreaded possibility of having to move back home), One More for the People becomes something unexpected: a survival guide. In the spirit of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, Grover transforms her own misfortune into a tale as unsettling as it is entertaining.