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Love, Life.
love, life. is a memoir-fable about coming out, going back in, grief, eating Italian, and catching the Piazzo Bernardini. Funny, ascerbic, this is a story of first unrequited love that follows emotional truth rather than chronological time, and is layered with darkly delicious tendencies. The ending will move readers to resume their own journey, loving life more.
178 pages, Paperback
Published October 16, 2020
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August 9, 2021
For frig sake, Bernie, reading Love, Life [Breakwater Books] has caused me consternation. As if I didn’t have enough grief about aging!
I’m a curmudgeon, so old that the flesh on my hands “drapes like a glove.” (Thanks for that image!) I’ve long since come to grips with my curly locks abandoning my noggin, leaving my naked pate to sizzle like frying bacon in the August sun. I’ve learned to accept my old-man nostrils sprouting paintbrush bristles. I’ve gripped tweezers in palsied paws and plucked ears that have become densely hirsute since I’ve been living life in the last lane.
And now I must worry about … well, hairy toes.
Thanks a friggin’ bunch, Bernie.
About the book though …
Bernardine — Bird? Nee Nee? — “sails across the skies in a tin can” to Italy, in search of her selves.
As Bob Dylan claimed recently, as Walt Whitman stated back in eighteen-something or other, as Jesus, or Satan, or some biblical scribe declared in scripture, Bernadine believes she contains multitudes: “There is a multitude within me. I feel them.”
Incidentally, while searching for her selves, Bernadine hopes to find the perfect Italian dress, “something like Sophia Loren would wear.”
An aside: You might not care a fig, but in a previous century when my bare toes still twinkled, I lusted after Sohpia Loren.
Sophia is still a stately lady, still a fine figure of a woman at eighty-odd, eh b’ys? Please God, her toes have not grown hairy.
Bernadine again …
Like so many of us — shaggy toes or not — Bernadine feels she’s ten pounds overweight. Which explains why she squeezes herself into a “dysfunctional” Spanx — “Encased like a wild moose sausage.”
B’ys, now there’s an image
Forgive me. Another aside: I hope it has never come to pass that Sophia Loren (God bless her eternal voluptuousness) ever jannied-up in a Spanx.
Immediately before she flies across the skies in a tin can, Bernadine comes out as a bisexual “in the most spectacularly awkward way imaginable.” (Whatever that is.)
Then, immediately after her arrival in Italy, Bernadine falls down a rabbit hole, so to speak.
While wandering in the marvelous Italian Wonderland, Bernadine meets Sofia whose “toes are hairy and her nails are unvarnished.”
Aha.
I dare not say Vanity — or Frailty, for that matter — thy name is woman, as Billy the Bard has Hamlet spout, for fear of having my noggin knocked, but …
… but Bernadine’s reflections on Botox — while feeling a bit like a moose sausage, no doubt — generates a big wide grin on my chops. She considers the procedure of using a needle to suck fat from her buttocks and then injecting it into her lips: “I might have cellulite on my face,” she says, “but at least no one will have to bend over to kiss my arse.”
Hardy-har-har, eh b’ys?
The author herself — selves?— says Love, Life is a fable. As such, it encourages us to love life, and gives us a peek into the lonely heroine’s love life, I suppose.
I dare to say, Love, Life is a book for women, not really intended for readers such as this flabby septuagenarian scribbler who has examined his own toes — hairy? I’m not saying — and would never attempt to stog his masculine flab into a man-Spanx.
Nevertheless, I did enjoy the heroine’s self- (selves?) denigrating humour. At times it tickled me so far beyond pink that I tumbled down in the fits.
Truly.
Thank you for reading.
I’m a curmudgeon, so old that the flesh on my hands “drapes like a glove.” (Thanks for that image!) I’ve long since come to grips with my curly locks abandoning my noggin, leaving my naked pate to sizzle like frying bacon in the August sun. I’ve learned to accept my old-man nostrils sprouting paintbrush bristles. I’ve gripped tweezers in palsied paws and plucked ears that have become densely hirsute since I’ve been living life in the last lane.
And now I must worry about … well, hairy toes.
Thanks a friggin’ bunch, Bernie.
About the book though …
Bernardine — Bird? Nee Nee? — “sails across the skies in a tin can” to Italy, in search of her selves.
As Bob Dylan claimed recently, as Walt Whitman stated back in eighteen-something or other, as Jesus, or Satan, or some biblical scribe declared in scripture, Bernadine believes she contains multitudes: “There is a multitude within me. I feel them.”
Incidentally, while searching for her selves, Bernadine hopes to find the perfect Italian dress, “something like Sophia Loren would wear.”
An aside: You might not care a fig, but in a previous century when my bare toes still twinkled, I lusted after Sohpia Loren.
Sophia is still a stately lady, still a fine figure of a woman at eighty-odd, eh b’ys? Please God, her toes have not grown hairy.
Bernadine again …
Like so many of us — shaggy toes or not — Bernadine feels she’s ten pounds overweight. Which explains why she squeezes herself into a “dysfunctional” Spanx — “Encased like a wild moose sausage.”
B’ys, now there’s an image
Forgive me. Another aside: I hope it has never come to pass that Sophia Loren (God bless her eternal voluptuousness) ever jannied-up in a Spanx.
Immediately before she flies across the skies in a tin can, Bernadine comes out as a bisexual “in the most spectacularly awkward way imaginable.” (Whatever that is.)
Then, immediately after her arrival in Italy, Bernadine falls down a rabbit hole, so to speak.
While wandering in the marvelous Italian Wonderland, Bernadine meets Sofia whose “toes are hairy and her nails are unvarnished.”
Aha.
I dare not say Vanity — or Frailty, for that matter — thy name is woman, as Billy the Bard has Hamlet spout, for fear of having my noggin knocked, but …
… but Bernadine’s reflections on Botox — while feeling a bit like a moose sausage, no doubt — generates a big wide grin on my chops. She considers the procedure of using a needle to suck fat from her buttocks and then injecting it into her lips: “I might have cellulite on my face,” she says, “but at least no one will have to bend over to kiss my arse.”
Hardy-har-har, eh b’ys?
The author herself — selves?— says Love, Life is a fable. As such, it encourages us to love life, and gives us a peek into the lonely heroine’s love life, I suppose.
I dare to say, Love, Life is a book for women, not really intended for readers such as this flabby septuagenarian scribbler who has examined his own toes — hairy? I’m not saying — and would never attempt to stog his masculine flab into a man-Spanx.
Nevertheless, I did enjoy the heroine’s self- (selves?) denigrating humour. At times it tickled me so far beyond pink that I tumbled down in the fits.
Truly.
Thank you for reading.
Displaying 1 of 1 review