Improbable Love

Had my mother’s best friend, a widow eighteen years my senior, not seduced me that night as I read my high school text in her den, there would be no story to tell. Despite my initial shock and confusion, we quickly became lovers. For several years, a web of entangled emotions and deceptions promoted and protected our relationship. In it, I experienced great pleasure as well as despair at my inability to be the full partner of an older woman. This memoir of a youth and his older lover illuminates many facets of American life from the late 1940s to the early ‘60s. It also raises challenging questions about love, sex, responsibility, and the human condition, among them: “Can a young man and a woman of significantly greater age become a committed couple and remain so for life?”