Bøger af Jacqueline Gay Walley

"Dostoyevsky said, Beauty saves, and, in THE WAW, an individualistic, creative woman of a certain age follows a vision that calls her to place of great beauty by the sea in England. There she encounters remarkable people of strength. The beauty of the place and people, in essence, transform her"--

An older woman on a quest to find her eros and to be desired. A woman over sixty wants her sexuality, her eros back. It opens with the main character going on a date alone, walks herself along the High Line in New York, shops for a book at The Strand and goes to hear Mahler. She remembers the past when she had that juiciness, and she finds lovers in the present, but something is amiss. She has a friendship with a female holocaust survivor who lives upstairs, who has that eros, even over 80, just in her being. The older woman dies, but in the lessons she leaves behind, the narrator finally finds that eros within her attitude toward life.Award: Leapfrog Press Finalist∩╗┐Quote: "Mira sat down across from her. ''The thing about ending up old, broke, alone is you feel so stupid. But it''s not like one had a choice. The real tragedy is if you could not put yourself forward in youth . . . you pay . . . now. Thus you pay young and you pay old. In the middle you run around with your head cut off.''       Lucia looked down at her newspaper. ''Your real problem is you have a boyfriend who doesn''t want to kiss you.''      Mira ignored that. ''What I like about your book, by the way, is that it''s vulnerable. And risky. And you just keep going. That is what I like so much. You just kept going.'' 

The "I" is a woman who is deliberating getting married to her boyfriend and is frightened. Her childhood has made her distrust union. She has a friend who has just gone to jail for growing marijuana. He has been a war hero, an artist, is good looking, a womanizer. She begins to visit him, because he is trapped like she is, and he gives her advice on love and herself. She begins to listen. He is the one who is "free" to her. In listening to him, she begins to itemize her own crimes in love. She marries her boyfriend, out of friendship, but the marriage feels doomed to her because the prisoner''s mind is lodged inside her. She has to come to where she belongs and what is freedom to her.