LOVING BEFORE LOVING

Lester describes a radical marriage and its aftermath in this personal memoir.

The author met Julius Lester in the summer of 1962 at a summer camp in the Catskills, where they were both working as counselors. The Connecticut-raised, activism-minded Joan had been taking a break from college to work for a bit. Julie, as Lester liked to be known, was fresh out of college in Nashville and had headed to New York City to become a writer. Joan was white, Julie Black. Despite their inflexible personalities, they bonded over their mutual love of literature and their intense attraction to one another. “Maybe we really were the intellectual soul mates we believed we were, and some sixth sense let me know it,” reflects Lester. “Was I as forbidden to him, my access to a white world equally beguiling? He gravitated to me as much as I to him, as if we were two magnets being pulled toward each other.” They wed later that year, at a time when interracial marriage was rare and, in some states, illegal. The marriage lasted eight years before ending in divorce—eight years filled with activism, frustration, and clashing ambitions set against the tumultuous backdrop of America in the 1960s. The author writes with candor about the complex dynamics of their relationship, which shifted over time, due in part to Julie’s growing fame as a writer: “Julie, I only realized later, was essentially a conservative man whose artistic bent drew him, for a time, into bohemian environments that felt like home to me,” writes Lester. “The historical moment of the early ’60s made it appear that we shared progressive values, but as the decade wore on, it became clear we did not.” The book continues past the divorce, detailing the author’s subsequent relationships, her embrace of her bisexuality, and the long process of figuring out how to live for herself. With its novelistic detail and earnest but imperfect characters, this memoir reveals more than most about what makes activists tick.

A frank love story set amid the ideals of the 1960s.