Each summer from 1989 until her death, in 2001, my husband and I had an annual rendezvous with Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, who in July and August was also the doyenne of Martha's Vineyard, slim in her summer slacks, her words spoken with a touch of well-bred lockjaw, presiding over events at her magnificent 218-acre property, called Mohu.

Shortly after arriving on the island, we would receive a letter such as this one on expensive thick blue paper, signed by Liz Hylton, Mrs. Graham's personal assistant:

Dear Maddy and John,

I am beginning to feel like your pen pal.

Mrs. Graham asks if she might tempt you to come to lunch on Saturday or Sunday (if you have someone with whom you can leave your children). It would be you and your houseguests, Mrs. Graham, Henry Kissinger (and Nancy K. if she can come at the last minute), Senator William Cohen of Maine and Brent Scowcroft. One o'clock whichever day works best for you.

The document would be hand-delivered by a member of Mrs. Graham's staff, who drove along the dirt road, up and back. At that time, the house had no phone, and we all took pride in the faux ruggedness of corresponding in such an old-fashioned, Jane Austen way.

Adapted from To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir, by Madeleine Blais, to be published next month by Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.; © 2017 by the author.

My favorite part of the letter was the parenthetical: "if you have someone with whom you can leave your children." The notion of taking our children to such a gathering gave rise to awkward scenarios: my son, aged eight, discussing firecrackers with Kissinger, or my daughter, then three, insisting that everyone do the hokey-pokey. We sent our regrets, by letter, and settled on another date.

The story goes that in 1972 Mrs. Graham purchased Mohu, the estate in Lambert's Cove, at the behest of Henry Beetle Hough— the author who edited and published Edgartown's Vineyard Gazette and wanted to keep the property out of the hands of developers. The house, with its views of the water, its furniture covered in white, and the round tables for dining that seated 10, felt like the set of a Katharine Hepburn movie, one in which the heroine shows verbal spunk and athletic poise in equal measure. At the entrance was a stack of straw hats for guests to borrow as a shield against the sun, in the event that lunch or drinks were served on the patio.

Mrs. Graham's way of receiving company was reminiscent of an elegant, long-ago time that was very elegant and is very gone. She stood five feet nine, a height that underscored her natural grace. Before dinner she served simple drinks (typically wine or Kir) and French-style hors d'oeuvres (a sip of gazpacho in a cordial glass or a dab of smoked-tuna pate atop a cucumber slice), never anything showy or loudly caloric.

If you arrived at Mohu before everyone else, you might be treated to a gabfest about the upcoming guests: who was overrated, who was sleeping with whom, who was a drama queen ("She can turn the simple act of boiling an egg into a three-act play"), and who was the real deal, possessing true talent that never dims. Punctuality paid off.

Our first invitation from Mrs. Graham was verbal and offhand, issued at a memorial service in June of 1989 for former Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons.

An under-appreciated player in the Watergate saga, Simons had been working the night the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate complex were broken into. On a desultory Friday-to-Saturday overnight shift in the nation's capital, two disconnected, seemingly comic events attracted Simons's attention: the break-in at the Watergate by five men wearing surgical gloves (arrested on June 17, 1972, at 2:30 A.M.) and a car crashing into someone's house while two people were making love on a sofa. That morning, Simons reported in to Mrs. Graham, and at the time they both chuckled, having no reason to disagree with Ron Ziegler, President Richard Nixon's press secretary, who dismissed the break-in as a "third-rate burglary attempt," warning that "certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is." Later, Mrs. Graham wrote, "None of us, of course, had any idea how far the story would stretch; the beginning—once the laughter died down—all seemed so farcical."

The house felt like a Katharine Hepburn movie, the heroine showing verbal spunk and athletic poise in equal measure.

I was taken aback by her request ("You must call when you get to the island and we will find a time to get together") but felt an obligation to honor it. None of us ever feels as if we know all the rules to a good life, but surely one of them is that if someone you admire on the scale that I admired Mrs. Graham says you must call, you do. As a publisher, she had gone mano a mano with the Nixon White House and subjected herself to threats and ridicule, including bizarre comments from the former attorney general John Mitchell, who said, "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer."

We knew she was working on her memoir in those days, and it seemed to be taking an uncomfortably long time to complete. But when Personal History finally appeared, in 1997, to the tune of 625 pages, I remember feeling relieved, relieved that it was done and also relieved, after I had read it, that it was written in the style of the best memoirs, with no regard to inflating the author's virtues and with all due diligence in recording the more vulnerable moments. She was depressed at college (starting at Vassar, then transferring to the University of Chicago) and, she confessed, wore the same yellow sweater every day until Thanksgiving.

Personal History has an air of detached dignity, as if the author is beyond currying favor or proving points. Her audience appears not to be her children or even her grandchildren but descendants yet to be born, who might want to know what it was like when their great-great-great-grandmother was running the world.

Katharine Graham combined power in public space with vulnerability in the private sector. She inherited the helm at the Post from her handsome, charismatic husband, who drank, was verbally abusive, subject to crippling depressions and manias, and at one point ran off with his mistress, almost taking his majority share in the Washington Post Company with him. He shot himself in the head at their country house.

A longtime fan of memoirs, I have often pondered the difference between them and autobiographies. In the end, to my way of thinking, autobiographies tend to encompass the full span of a life and are usually written by people who occupy some kind of public space: ex-presidents, ambassadors, heads of the Federal Reserve.

Memoirs are written by less obviously eminent sorts. Generals write autobiographies; foot soldiers write memoirs. Personal History is unusual in that it is both an autobiography and a memoir because its author is both a general and a foot soldier. Mrs. Graham was at the center of history as a major publisher, often referred to in her heyday as the most powerful woman in the world, and also at its outskirts: a single woman bringing up four children on her own.

Having had the job of publisher thrust upon her, she writes, "I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn.... What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge."

Once a summer, when we saw each other, alternating as hosts, it was always a thrill but also discombobulating. I would fret about what to serve. She would have been embarrassed to learn that I felt so ... flummoxed. In her manner she conveyed the fiction that we were on an even playing field, hostess-wise, which would have been true if only I had had my own full-time French chef, gifts of dish sets from world leaders, and guests who ran countries on a routine basis. One time I served grilled swordfish from John's Fish Market, assured that it had been harpooned rather than longlined. This environmentally sound method of catching the fish jacks up the flavor and makes the meat fresher and firmer but also inflates the price. My sole culinary intrusion was to gussy it up with the sheerest membrane of store-bought mayonnaise to seal in the flavor before putting it on the grill. I am a minimalist when it comes to fresh local food.

When Mrs. Graham insisted that I share my recipe with her chef, I was so embarrassed that I had not concocted some kind of fancy remoulade that I pretended to be one of those secret-hoarding cooks, and I said I would be happy to exchange the information for, oh, say, the identity of Deep Throat. "My dear," she said in her low cultured voice, "you drive a hard bargain."

The next time, we served her lobster, the delicacy for which today's diners nearly abase themselves but which was so plentiful in the 19th century that it was used as yard fertilizer. The theory behind serving lobster to Mrs. Graham was that it automatically made hierarchies vanish, what with the infantilizing bibs and the projectile juices and the debate over whether the yucky parts were edible, not to mention the sound effects, the pounding, the cracking, the slurps, the satisfied sighs.

That night we talked about life in Washington. As one of her dinner companions, writer and photographer Nancy Doherty (the wife of author Joe McGinniss), wrote afterward, "We learned some interesting facts. She voted for George Bush the First, Bobby Kennedy once reduced her to tears, she thinks [his brother] Teddy needs to clean up his act big-time, and she eats lobster with admirable gusto ... in short, she is one of the most impressive icons we've ever spent an evening with."

I always felt stumped when it came to hostess gifts for Mrs. Graham. The usual bottle of wine or tea towels or soap seemed all wrong, especially considering the competition, such as when her husband's half-brother, Senator Bob Graham, visited from Florida, bringing not only avocados and Key limes but also the news that he might run for national office.

One time I praised the beautifully painted plates on which dinner was served, and she said, "Oh, those were from the King of Jordan. He visited [and] afterwards sent this huge crate of dishes." Another pricey-looking keepsake: "Oh, I have Princess Di to thank for that. What a lovely young woman."

My offerings were more humble. When water shoes first came out, I gave her a pair (she seemed delighted), and on another occasion I took her a stack of memoirs, including my standbys: This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff, and A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway.

In the 1990s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton started showing up on the Vineyard with increasing frequency, Katharine Graham was constantly asked whether she would be entertaining them. Her response never varied. It was airy and self-protective: "I have no plans at the moment. I take my orders from Vernon"—Vernon being Vernon Jordan, the president's confidant and golfing buddy. Jordan and his wife had a custom of going to Mrs. Graham's for dinner on their first night on the island every summer, no matter how late, as a way of sounding a certain gong. She found it amusing that the very people who were the first to decry the "dreadful commotion" a presidential visit inevitably stirs were also the ones to lobby most boldly for an invitation to her dinners in the president's honor.

The topics we covered at Mrs. Graham's non-presidential dinners ranged from the peccadilloes of world leaders to the stresses of traveling to the island by steamship. Question: "Did J.F.K. choose a better class of women to have affairs with than Clinton?" Answer: "How do you spell Judith Campbell Exner?" and "What does that mean anyway, 'better class of women'?"

One evening Ron Rappaport, the attorney on the board of the Steamship Authority, defended a recent wave of cancellations of the ferry due to bad weather. Mrs. Graham looked up, puzzled: "Ron! If you can't reverse an act of God, what kind of lawyer are you?"

The last time I saw Mrs. Graham was at a reading at Politics and Prose, in Washington, D.C, The bookstore owners were eager that she be seated in a comfortable chair, but she acted embarrassed, as the last thing she wanted was to appear enthroned. Afterward, she joined me and my sister, Jacqueline, from USA Today, Washington Times editor Hank Pearson, Athelia Knight, of the Post, and others at a restaurant chosen for its proximity so as to minimize the amount of walking Mrs. Graham would have to do. Her pace was slow, but she resisted being led by the elbow. I remember glancing down at the sidewalk and noticing her shoes, sleek pumps pretty enough to verge on the impractical. What I liked about her shoes was their defiance: a flag in honor of the glad girl she must once have been. The restaurant proved too loud, and the dinner passed too quickly, and when I walked Mrs. Graham out to her car and to the driver who awaited her, we vowed to see each other soon, in early August, on the Vineyard. A few weeks later, in July 2001, she fell on a sidewalk and lost consciousness in Sun Valley, Idaho, where she was attending a conference. She died several days later.

Her funeral, at Washington National Cathedral, attracted thousands. Bach was played. Bells tolled. The 23rd Psalm was read. Anthems were sung. More music: Respighi, Handel. Former executive editor of the Post Ben Bradlee said his onetime boss was a "spectacular dame," adding, "Well, Mums, what a way to go! Lunch with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson on that last day. Bridge with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates the day before. Dinner the night before that, with... the new president of Mexico. And now Yo-Yo Ma, to send you on your storied way. Not bad for the widowed mother of four, who started her career at the top, 38 years ago, in great tragedy and great trepidation. Not bad at all.

"Speaking of 'widowed mother of four,' did you ever hear of the 'Widowed Grandmother Defense,' developed by our lawyers when Spiro T. Agnew tried to subpoena our reporters' notes in an effort to escape jail?

"We had refused to surrender these notes. Reporters don't own their own notes, Joe Califano told the district court. The owner of the paper owns them. And let's see if they dare throw Katharine Graham in jail.

"She was delighted at the prospect. Maybe not all of you understand exactly what it takes to make a great newspaper. It takes a great owner. Period. An owner who commits herself with passion and the highest standards and principles to a simple search for truth. With fervor, not favor. With fairness and courage.... This is what Kay Graham brought to the table, plus so much more."

Katharine Graham belonged to the world. She belonged to The Washington Post, to Ben Bradlee, and to Martha's Vineyard. She also belonged to candid, cultured talk at magical gatherings with old friends, and new.