First Loves: A Memoir - Hardcover

Solotaroff, Ted

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158322582X ISBN 13: 9781583225820

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2003

Synopsis

Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his generation, the founder of the New American Review, editor and friend of Philip Roth, and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins. Solotaroff reveals himself here as a thinking man with a big heart and gaping wounds of love that are not disconnected from the contributions he has made to American culture throughout his career.
Solotaroff turns back to the earliest pages of his romance with Lynn, remembering his first sighting of her emerging from the water as if from a dream. Yet the image, as he penetrates the intervening layers of sorrow and disappointment, is almost impossibly distant, fragile. First Loves reenacts the blurring of a perfect conception in the mind of a man who would devote his life to precision of thought and word. This opposition, of romantic and intellectual passion, drives the narrative and eventually brings it to crisis.
First Loves could be described as a very private feat of honesty from a public intellectual. Solotaroff’s willingness to admit the failures, personal and professional, alongside the triumphs of his career gives a three-dimensional intensity to the emotions on the page. Working with all of the gritty and romantic elements of his storied life, Solotaroff manages to avoid a tone too heroic or honey-dipped; he manages simply to tell the tale.

About this title

About the Author:

TED SOLOTAROFF was an editor of Commentary and the editor of Bookweek before he founded the influential literary journal New American Review, later American Review. The first volume of his memoirs, Truth Comes in Blows (1998), won the Martha Albrand award for 1998 from American PEN for the art of the memoir, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award. Solotaroff is the author of two acclaimed books of criticism and cultural commentary, The Red-hot Vacuum and A Few Good Voices in My Head. He lives in East Quogue, Long Island, and in Paris.

From Publishers Weekly:

The loves alluded to in the title of this unflinching but amiable follow-up to the critically lauded Truth Comes in Blows are both romantic and intellectual. Both loves are imperfect, but with Solotaroff-who founded American Review-as navigator, they are fascinatingly so. The bewitching Marilyn Ringler and Solotaroff met in 1948 when they were working at a Jewish resort on Long Island. "I was nearly twenty, two months out of the navy, and hadn't had much luck with girls whom I didn't pay," Solotaroff declares in a confession that's typical for this public intellectual more bemused than wracked by the recollection of his younger days. There were considerable mistakes and woes early on, although he has crafted another memoir that is admirably shorn of remorse. Solotaroff indulgently embarked on a career as a writer even though the signs were neon-bright that his talent lay in criticism. After Solotaroff and Lynn, as he calls her, married, Lynn began seeing rats and ghosts at night. Moving to New York for the mangy bohemian life he'd fantasized about, Solotaroff became a scrappy laborer as the couple, "so uncannily tuned in to each other" out of the bedroom, were forced to grapple with their sexual incompatibility. They eventually had two children, and Solotaroff settled down to life as a critic. Although he has a tendency to compare nearly everyone in his memoir to major literary figures ("Elizabeth reminded me of Virginia Woolf"; "I was on the way to becoming a younger version of Leopold Bloom"), Solotaroff manages to imbue all of them with full humanity.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 158322582X
• ISBN 13: 9781583225820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304