Starting Out in the '50s

The best memoirs of recent years reveal "The Way We Live Now" as well as or better than most contemporary fiction. Through telling their personal stories, authors like Mary Karr (The Liars' Club) and Tobias Wolff (In Pharaoh's Army) conveyed a deep sense of the times they lived through, the problems and challenges of their situation, using the techniques of fiction--good dialogue, observation of details, dramatic descriptions of crucial scenes. The author's trials, failures and triumphs provide the plot.

Ted Solotaroff joined the ranks of such artful autobiographers with Truth Comes in Blows, a memoir of childhood and family that won an American PEN award in 1998. Now he has added another volume, First Loves, which picks up where the last one left off, with the author home from naval service in World War II and about to start college on the GI Bill.

First Loves takes place from 1948, when Solotaroff met his first wife, until the breakup of their marriage in 1962. The "loves" of the title refer not only to his courtship, marriage, fatherhood of two sons and eventual divorce but also the love of literature that became his lifework as a teacher, editor, literary journalist and critic. Through writing his intimate experience of each of these loves, Solotaroff conveys a great deal about both marriage and literature during that era.

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