To the famous list of three events that anthropologists say characterize human life around the globe—birth, marriage, and death—I wonder if it isn’t time to add a fourth: first love.
Who among us has not had a sparkling-eyed boy or girl—that person we met when young and couldn’t keep our minds off, the one we hungrily wanted to look at again and again and again? And have never forgotten?
Most crushes are probably ephemeral, and the power they exert can make them seem silly, a childish example of emotion trumping reason. “Amour fou, ”say the French; or “puppy love” (a phrase I have always hated for its dismissiveness, for who loves more passionately than the young?). Others, however, are clearly deep and last a long time. And profundity lurks in something that focuses all our attention and touches us to the core.
Those who have held a crush know that it can be hard to make other people understand. But here in your hands is something new. Amy Benson’s book makes infatuation fascinating to us. I have never read anything like it; in the intensity of its feeling and the sheer music of its language, it leapt at me from the stack of submissions for this year’s Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
Benson has written a singular, mostly one-sided love story. Like most good fiction, it is a product much more of the writer’s mind than of the give and take between actual lovers. But the sparkling-eyed boy, a real person, never seems to me misrepresented or exploited; Benson is too smart to broadly objectify him. If we do not know his mind, that does not mean he is belittled by her adoration.
In fact, as Benson notes ruefully, in the beginning it was he who had the crush on her. Only later do the roles reverse, and we see how, over time, this prolonged, distanced relationship has had agony and loneliness, crossed signals and mixed messages and bad timing, just like a more conventional one.
The book is also a searing self-examination, the literary diary of a woman who follows herself and the boy from the weirdly pure impulse that first love represents to a child or adolescent to the more complicated thing it implies for a woman headed toward thirty. Her thoughts of the sparkling-eyed boy distract her from other relationships but bind her to a youth she cherishes. She recognizes how unrealistic her feelings are, knows that she is probably idealizing the now-grown “boy,” but is not prepared to admit that this is necessarily bad. He is, she writes, “the perfect elsewhere on which I might dwell.” Upset at not seeing him one night, she is told by a wise friend, “You’re pining for something; you’re not really pining for him. ”I believe Amy Benson’s daring self-exposure in matters of the heart will resonate with many readers.
This volume is also just a sheer pleasure to read. As they hear her story, I think readers will be enmeshed, as I was, by Benson’s remarkable dexterity with language, by the careful crafting and inspiration that result in verbal surprises on practically every page. There is music here, and poetry, and they combine with Benson’s recursive examinations of self to move the art of memoir in a fascinating and promising new direction.
Maybe one other reason I loved this book is that I had a crush on a pretty tomboy from kindergarten to about sixth grade; she was, after my mom, the first love of my life. She was the only one who could keep up with me—even beat me—at playground sprints and spelling tests. We shared captainship of the safety patrol. She was brave and strong, once whipping a neighborhood braggart in a fight, a feat I wildly admired. We were terribly shy; I don’t think we ever even held hands or did much more than walk home together after school. But for years after we fell out of touch I would think of her, wonder what she was doing, and occasionally torture myself by contemplating what our lives might have been like if we had declared our love and stayed with that first, pure thing.
Then, quite a long time after, I was spared further second-guessing of the choices I had made when I heard from a mutual acquaintance that my first love had lived with the same person now for years and years—and that this life partner was a woman. It would never have worked anyway. With a stroke came closure; but how many of us are so lucky?
Ted Conover
NEW YORK CITY