Joyce Maynard

Relates a story of love, sexual passion, painful adolescence, and devastating betrayal as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy--and the man he later becomes--looking back on the events of a single long, hot, and life-altering weekend.

In a memoir of learning to understand true love through the experience of loss, the author describes finding the love of her life in her late fifties, only to lose him to pancreatic cancer less than three years into their marriage.

Struggling to make ends meet after alcoholism costs her her marriage and custody of her young son, photographer Helen slowly rebuilds her life before falling into the circle of a philanthropist couple whose help exacts a terrible price.