Fragile Innocence

Chapter One

[1]

The year 1981 was the end of an era in our personal lives. But we did not know yet that a much-longer, more-complicated era was about to begin. For ten years, from the moment I married that willowy, tough-minded, high-spirited, and high-cheekboned girl from the Bronx in a retrograde ceremony in the Blue Ridge Mountains, we had lived the often ecstatic, sometimes stormy, perfectly ordinary existence of two young lovers trying to solidify our union as we started our careers and our family outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In that decade I had published five books, two of them novels, launched my first play, and taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina. At the end of the decade, we had two children: Maeve, who arrived in 1978 as the envy of the Gerber baby advertisers, and then Devin, who came floppy-eared in 1980, as the fastest crawler in the East.

Denise is seven years my younger. In the twilight of late sixties activism we met in New York City, where together we worked in the spirit of the times at a poverty program called the Neighborhood Youth Corps. The program w ... read full excerpt from Fragile Innocence ebook