Objects Of Desire - A Portrait of Love and Marriage

This is a love store, told in a completely different way. Eleanor MacKenzie, just graduated from Barnard, and Ralph Graves, just graduated from Harvard, met as brand-new researchers at Life magazine in September 1948. They soon married other people, but the two couples then became closest friends. After seven years of that closeness, Eleanor and Ralph realized that they were profoundly in love. Both went through bitter and punitive divorces to get to each other. It was worth it. The have now been married for 45 years. This book is the story of their love and marriage, told through the myriad objects that have played a significant role in that story. Gifts, homes, cars, paintings, books, furniture, jewelry, clothes-all are invested with the deeply emotional value that grew out of what those objects of desire meant to those people. But the story does not apply only to these two particular people. As Ralph Graves says about these objects that carry that resonance. The objects are different for each of us, but the resonance is the same. The book is an intimate picture of resonance in love and marriage.

 Ralph Graves is the author of six novels and four nonfiction books. A distinguished journalist, he started at Life magazine as a young researcher just out of college and rose through the ranks to become the last editor of the weekly Life. He later became the editorial director for all Time, Inc. magazines. His wife, Eleanor Graves, also started her career as a Life researcher and became a writer and senior editor. When Life resumed publication as a monthly, she was named executive editor, at that time the highest editorial rank for any woman in Time, Inc. They live in New York City and on Martha's Vineyard, where both are active in conservation work.