Elizabeth Von Vogt

An Awful Intimacy Elizabeth Von Vogt

Mary Lou Liever is living on the Maine coast, has grieved obsessively over the death of her husband for almost two years. She is sixty-three now, but she retreats from most human contact-only a dinner here and there with her grown-up children. She is alone and begins to live through a newly awakened imagination. She is trying to escape the strange intimacy that had engulfed her thirty-two year marriage to a man twelve years older. She dreams of the lives she could have lived instead of the real one that is leaving so much misery in its wake. So many places she could have gone to and lived in, other men she could have married, even the divorce she could have had, the solitary life, the careers. But all fancied paths fail. How will she learn to live with the real, the loss?