Miracle at Midlife: A Transatlantic Romance

2017 Gold Medal IPPY Award in Autobiography/Memoir
They first meet in Paris in the spring of 1996. David is a divorced American attorney living on a converted barge moored on the banks of the Seine; Roni Beth is an empty-nested clinical and research psychologist working from her home in Connecticut. Now in their fifties, both have signed off on loving again—until they meet each other.
Miracle at Midlife tells the inspiring story of Roni Beth and David’s intense and transformative transatlantic courtship. Along the way, David the loner, living amid the beauty, freedom, and pleasures of Paris, brings Roni Beth, a responsible and overextended professional haunted by earlier loss and trauma, back to her core as a woman, while she helps him reclaim connections that tie him to a larger world. They wrestle internal demons (mostly hers) and external threats (friends, family and different perspectives) as they share adventures in their respective worlds. Throughout their journey, stories of courage, joy and integrity bring hope and delight to those who wonder how romantic love appears and evolves; inspiration to people in mid-life who, knowingly or unknowingly, have completed a chapter in their lives and are ready to move on; and comfort to anyone who longs to wrestle and conquer the demons of fear, born of history or of the unknown, and win. Testimony that love is real.

Roni Beth Tower grew up in Akron, Ohio, majored in religion at Barnard College, and earned her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Yale University. Later in life she taught clinical psychology to graduate students at Teachers College, Columbia University. As a psychologist, she published seventeen articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, six book chapters, three entries in Blackwell’s The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology, work for hire in three books edited by Mark Levine and Stephen Pollan, and one book review; presented her work at national and international professional conferences; was President of American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery and on the boards of Connecticut Psychological Association and Yale Alumni Fund. Miracles at Midlife is her first memoir. She and her husband live in Tarrytown, New York, within easy visiting distance of their six grandchildren. She loves yoga, dance, quilting, and bringing comfort and joy to people.