You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

Overview

"Beautiful, brainy, and offbeat" (Entertainment Weekly), a perfect sophisticated summer read.

By turns funny, charming, and tragic, Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel introduces leading Alzheimer's researcher Dr. Victor Aaron, who spends his days alternating between long hours in the lab and running through memories of his late wife, Sara. He's preserved their marriage as a perfect, if tumultuous, duet between two opposite but compatible souls. Until the day he discovers a series of index cards in Sara's handwriting that chronicle the major "changes in direction of their marriage." Suddenly this eminent memory expert finds his faith in memory itself unraveling, and he must, along with his support network of strong women-from his lab assistant to Aunt Betsy, the doddering doyenne of the island where they all live-determine a way to move on.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594485244
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/02/2011
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Rosecrans Baldwin is a founding editor of the popular website The Morning News, host of the annual “Tournament of Books.” His work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Nation, on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and he currently writes “The Digital Ramble,” for The Moment, a New York Times blog. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Baldwin's prose is wise and nimble, clever without being self-conscious, true to the myriad voices of his characters." —-Washington Post

Editorial Reviews

…moving and genuine…Baldwin is not writing about the kind of sadness that can sweep us away, the Heathcliff-banging-his-forehead-on-a-tree kind of grief. The sadness in these pages is about the emotional inadequacy that everyone feels, that total loneliness that overtakes us despite love and family, and the ultimate fear of losing our faculties, losing what makes us who we are…Baldwin's prose is wise and nimble, clever without being self-conscious, true to the myriad voices of his characters.
—The Washington Post

Fiona Zublin

"Baldwin's prose is wise and nimble, clever without being self-conscious, true to the myriad voices of his characters." ---Washington Post

From the Publisher

In this flaccid first novel, a scientist picks through memories of his marriage to a writer.

He's no slouch, this Victor Aaron. The 58-year-old geneticist is a top Alzheimer's researcher; after stints at Harvard and NYU, he's now professor at a prestigious institute on Maine's Mount Desert Island. His personal life is a mess since Sara, his wife of 33 years, died in a car accident. Victor has been meeting secretly once a week with Regina, a young postgraduate researcher on campus who writes poetry and enjoys burlesque dancing. Is she just "bereavement therapy"? Maybe so, for the sex has petered out since Victor became impotent, and Sara is always on his mind. When their marriage was going through a rough patch, her therapist had them write about its most important moments; in her index card notes, Sara comes through loud and clear. Professional advancement was important for this childless couple; Sara's path was rockier than Victor's. It was not until she turned 40 that she hit paydirt with a feminist play that became a Broadway smash. Another fallow period ended with her greatest success, a screenplay for a romantic comedy. Not surprisingly, Sara and Victor have different memories of these pivotal moments. Their adultery-free marriage is threatened only once, whenan ill-chosen word of Victor's leads to separate bedrooms and Sara's departure to Los Angeles. The incident confirms the stereotypes of Temperamental Artist and Insensitive Scientist ("Victor listens to neurons, not people"). Baldwin tries to spice up his thinly plotted novel with an array of minor characters (his libertine best friend, his outspoken goddaughter, his gossipy aunt), all of them feistier than the bland Victor.

Fails to achieve liftoff.

Kirkus Reviews