LOVE ATOP A KEYBOARD

Semiretired journalist Ghent reflects on love and loss in this debut memoir.

“This is our last vacation together,” the author recalls telling her husband during a 1988 spring break trip to San Diego. After years of “unspoken tension,” the couple made the decision to break up. This chapter sets the tone for a book that juxtaposes Ghent’s professional life as an award-winning San Francisco Bay Area journalist with societal pressures to find love and get married. When she was a cum laude graduate from Oberlin College in 1964, she notes, her family was proud of her, but also “anxious for [her] to take the next step” in finding a husband. “How does marriage and children fit in with your plans?” asked her mother upon hearing Ghent’s desire to be “a book editor, or a theater reviewer, or at the very least a journalist.” Following her 1988 divorce from her first husband, she spent years, at the height of her career, looking for “late-life love.” Although she’s a realist who acknowledges that her relationship with her second husband continues “to veer off course, exploring new paths,” their story will nevertheless tug at romantic readers’ heartstrings. Ghent is a talented writer who blends a down-to-earth prose style with vivid turns of phrase. For instance, after she describes how she and her current spouse first met in 1999 at FAO Schwarz in San Francisco, where they played together on the toy store’s notable giant floor piano, she writes, “That keyboard is gone, but we’re still playing, still making music.” Covid-era lockdowns, including the couple’s defiance of federal suggestions to avoid cruises, effectively offer a reflection on the nature of solitude. The author also writes deeply about her Jewish faith. During an interview with Elie Wiesel, Ghent casually mentioned that “I happen to be Jewish”; the famed Holocaust survivor and activist responded, “Don’t happen to be Jewish. Be Jewish”—a statement that would inspire the author to take multiple trips to Israel and renew her interest in her religion.

An engaging and often poignant reflection on finding deep connections later in life.