Love's apprentice

Shirley Abbott's new memoir offers a delightful and completely original map of modern love. Taking Casanova as her mentor, Abbott charts her own amorous education as a woman coming of emotional age in the second half of the twentieth century.

Abbott's search for the romantic ideal began when she was a young girl in the South, informed by the movies and popular songs and fed by inevitable infatuations. It was the beginning of a lifelong journey that took her to Paris as a student of love and culture, to New York as a young professional, through-enthralling passions and crushing disappointments and hilarious miscues.

It carried her through the waxing and waning of marriage and the overpowering ardor of parenthood, to the triumphant realization that maturity offers liberation undreamed of in youth. Along the way, Abbott learned the crucial lesson that the school of romance is often the school of hard knocks. The idea of love was forever entrancing; reality often came up short.