Meeting. Loving. Losing. Love-Dumb is the story of my apprenticeship in sex and love. The memoir spans puberty, a rape at 18 on a train in Belgium, a spate of abusive boyfriends and a final eleventh-hour romance.
I begin a promising relationship online. Almost immediately, the relationship is threatened by long, pandemic-induced separations. Nevertheless, I continue to meet my partner in New York City, Serbia, Michigan, Malta, England, Peru, Mexico and South Africa. Traveling tests our mettle as well as our commitment. And, despite Covid and his failing heart, we are determined to prevail.
Auxiliary scenes of disastrous solo-parenting and stays in a psychiatric ward for depression bubble up from the deep well of recollection.
Fittingly, I explore the vagaries of memory. The way that it can bend and writhe and lie. The way that it can disappear as if the event had never happened. The way that no story is ever complete or true.