THE MURMUR OF EVERYTHING MOVING

An award-winning author explores love and loss in this poignant memoir.

“Some people are fools for love,” Stanton writes in a description of herself and her one-time fiancé, Steve. When the two first met in New York in the 1980s, Steve was an electrician from Michigan who was sent to Wappingers Falls for a temporary job and Stanton was a college graduate who tended bar while still searching for a career. Steve, as it turned out, was stuck in a failing marriage, and within two months of first meeting the two had fallen helplessly in love. The memoir’s opening chapters read like a romance novel; the two lovers shared a kiss that “tilted the trajectory of my life,” writes Stanton. Many chapters are tastefully erotic as the two explore each other’s bodies (“This became my mission,” Stanton writes; “to introduce him to hedonism”). While the couple thought they finally knew what love was, they would find out what it truly involved “the hard way” when Steve’s diagnosis of an aggressive form of cancer decimated their life plans. They became engaged shortly before Steve’s death, and while the author would fall in love again, she would never again wear the engagement ring of another. The book’s emotionally raw narrative addresses rarely covered topics pertaining to cancer and chemotherapy’s impact on romantic relationships, including the sexual aspect. “How could I allow myself to feel pleasure when Steve felt pain almost constantly?” Stanton asks. The book’s final third centers around the author’s grief; she initially processed her loss by writing letters to Steve every night for months and grappled with when to liberate herself from the symbolic heft of her engagement ring. A professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Stanton is a skilled author whose prose sparkles with literary panache. She deftly connects her story to universal experiences, from the first stages of infatuation and passionate love to the excruciating pain and confusion that accompanies the death of a partner.

A poignant, evocative story of love, death, and survival.