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Before You Met Me: A Memoir Of One Man's Troubled Search For Love
MILLION LITTLE PIECES meets Maggie Hamilton's WHAT MEN DON'T TALK ABOUT -- a raw, heartfelt memoir and a poignant insight into the emotional life of men. No matter how hard he tried, Alan Close couldn't stay in a relationship. Then, at the age of 43, after yet another breakup, he decided he was going to find out what was going wrong - and make a change. What followed was a painful yet ultimately revelatory process of looking back into the past - where memories of his childhood and early relationships where darkened by a long-forgotten secret he had failed to admit even to himself... A man has never written about relationships in this way. Lyrical, humorous but always frank and insightful, this new book by novelist and former columnist for Good Weekend takes us inside what it is to be a man today. Close explores his relationships, affairs, family history, and struggle with an eating disorder in his quest for intimacy and peace with the past. Along the way he reveals much about the psychology of men and their attitudes towards relationships. Beautifully written, in a narrative that is utterly compelling, this is a non-fiction first - a male memoir about relationships that is impossible to put down, sure to hold up a mirror to male readers and provide a rare insight to women.
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 11, 2026
If I had read this book 20 years ago I would have been one of the women Leo rails against - who wants to know secret men’s business. I might have generalised with phrases like “men are/do…” “men don’t know how to…” etc etc. But by working through my own messy “stuff” I have learned (and continue to learn) to stay in my own lane … to not entwine my own story with the thread of others by “therefore”, “me too”, “so that’s why” etc.
I know all too well the agenda setting women have (often subconsciously) re what is acceptable communicating, relating, socialising… As a communication and leadership coach (and as someone who chooses to be in partnership with a man who has sought to understand his own ways of being) I seek to keep taking the blinkers off my own assumptions about what’s acceptable and what’s not… and live with the at times pain of that.
Close has shared what I tell myself is a very vulnerable and intimate story of his early and mid life. The gift I brought to this book was the intention to listen without evaluation. In that space I’m telling myself I can hear something of the pain the author has been through and the commitment to find a way to a more satisfying life. I can sit with a story that I find gut wrenching. And - in that space I can stay connected to the pain that arises in my own story - which I could not experience if I was bringing an intellectualising presence (which all too easily keeps one disconnected from one’s heart and life energy and unable to hear and know the person talking … the theme at the core of this book).
Much gratitude to Close for choosing to make his story available. 8/10
I know all too well the agenda setting women have (often subconsciously) re what is acceptable communicating, relating, socialising… As a communication and leadership coach (and as someone who chooses to be in partnership with a man who has sought to understand his own ways of being) I seek to keep taking the blinkers off my own assumptions about what’s acceptable and what’s not… and live with the at times pain of that.
Close has shared what I tell myself is a very vulnerable and intimate story of his early and mid life. The gift I brought to this book was the intention to listen without evaluation. In that space I’m telling myself I can hear something of the pain the author has been through and the commitment to find a way to a more satisfying life. I can sit with a story that I find gut wrenching. And - in that space I can stay connected to the pain that arises in my own story - which I could not experience if I was bringing an intellectualising presence (which all too easily keeps one disconnected from one’s heart and life energy and unable to hear and know the person talking … the theme at the core of this book).
Much gratitude to Close for choosing to make his story available. 8/10
December 17, 2008
“Before You Met Me:
A Memoir Of One Man’s Troubled Search For Love”
by Alan Close
A review in verse
for no particular breakfast
by Benito Di Fonzo
I first heard Al Close
radiating down from far-away Bris-Vegas
on Sydney ABC Radio, 702.
I heard much of my own failings in his tale
as I sat in my Eveleigh Railyards desk procrasturbating
(the desk itself an inheritance from the lovely Greek-Italian princess
who’d O.D.’d at the Postie’s share-house in Enmore, but I digress...)
So anyway, when my Sicilian squeeze asked me what I
wanted for Xmas, I suggested she find me Close’s memoir
which apparently wasn’t so simple,
it being sold out everywhere in inner-city Sydney,
and her having to order it down from a
Co-Op Bookshop in Lismore.
Sydney, as it happens,
is where much of this memoir of failed love
is set like a drunken jelly,
filling the beer fridge of the author’s regrets
and wobbling like a six-pack of semi-melancholy pentatonic solos,
but I digress...
Socrates said that the unexamined life wasn't worth living
so there's no doubt now that Close’s must be worth a fair bit
as he has got as near to examining it as much as is
humanly, or porpoisely for that purpose, possible -
Close has held every one of his
former lovers under a microscope
Close has bottled every
reptilian-brained reaction he's had
Close has taken all his faults
and pinned them to the flaking flesh of his chest,
then slowly examined the wounds with a dirty chopstick -
patiently as a Buddhist at a Western Suburbs bus stop.
Then Close has run around the old rooms of his mind,
only his brain, desk, and distrust of his own
ability to make a decision an ever constant presence,
be they bedsits in Bondi,
gargantuan share-houses in Glebe,
nights in beds of wild strangers in New York,
sweating fears of frigging his future in San Francisco
and bedding down, mentally, in his work-shed in Byron
all shaken up and skolled
like a $3 bottle of Passion Pop in a student loungeroom...
... ... Then publicly expunged over the balcony... ...
... Much of it hitting the page as little soiled peas of hindsight
glistening and reflecting my own mis-travelled life -
Myself, Benito, a man in the winter of his own 30s -
a time when Close’s protagonist is making
much of the same mistakes and
frigg-ups fuelled by fears of commitment
forever present in that long, happy hour of adolescence
that one just never knows how, or why, or whether to end
till it’s too late -
Welcome To The Inefficient Inner Workings
Of The Australian Male.
Okay,
it's all gets a little too New Agey for me near the end
but what do you expect of a Northern NSW fin?
Although, rubber on the other glove,
this could just be my own back-catalogue debasing.
Either way, his picture of a confused bachelor by then in his 40s
struggling away at the page,
living the writers’ life in a hot tin shed
before beers at The Rails
(back when the train home to Sydney
still ran past the bar no doubt)
feel as honestly vivid as his amorous mistakes
in the front of a car in Coogee,
a backyard barbecue in Bondi,
or a meandering though Manhattan, listening to Lou Reed
and slowly letting go of the hypothetical son ‘Jack’
that his lover and he leave behind in a family planning clinic in Amsterdam
and whose absence he regrets decades later, when it’s way too late,
as he sweats in the humility of an approaching old age
outside Mullumbimby
(where I myself once spent a weird week
with a wild-haired brunette artist named Kellie O’D
after a gig at said Rails and The Gollan in Lismore,
supporting Greg Sheehan, The Reel Gone Hick Ups
and The Porno Puppets From Prague, followed by
skinny-dipping on a German Doctor’s bamboo plantation
and drinking cheap Champagne to old Tom Waits LPs
but I digress...)
Close writes boldly, and without characteristic male reticence,
(male pattern boldness?)
of his desperate retreat into therapy back in Sydney
and his discoveries and sketches of his own archetypal issues
and the patterns he now perceives in his former partners’ familial misgivings
as well as his failure to become a parent
or even a sane man to be in a relationship with –
At these times reading “Before You Met Me” is like
standing by the road in a dream where you’re
watching the corpses being cut out of a car crash
only to recognise the remains of yourself in the driver’s seat
making you even more unable to
tear yourself away from this fascinating
panel beater’s report of a battered heart and
perhaps still only slightly patched-up psyche.
Oh brother’s in reptilian naivety -
It's not often someone gives us
such a fascinating account of what could very well be
own future misgivings -
which is why perhaps every man-jack of you bloke-offs should read this.
Oh sorella’s of mysterious softly flesh –
it's also not so often that an Australian male
ever opens up the workings of his hub like this,
for all sorts of sweet- smelling voyeurs to sift through
(in fact the author is at one point chided by a mate for
stepping publicly into such otherwise mysterious ‘mans’ business’,)
- which is why perhaps every woman should read this...
In short then,
something for the hole in your family.
Al, I dug it,
and look forward to the sequel...
Your sin celery,
BDF.
6/1/09
A Memoir Of One Man’s Troubled Search For Love”
by Alan Close
A review in verse
for no particular breakfast
by Benito Di Fonzo
I first heard Al Close
radiating down from far-away Bris-Vegas
on Sydney ABC Radio, 702.
I heard much of my own failings in his tale
as I sat in my Eveleigh Railyards desk procrasturbating
(the desk itself an inheritance from the lovely Greek-Italian princess
who’d O.D.’d at the Postie’s share-house in Enmore, but I digress...)
So anyway, when my Sicilian squeeze asked me what I
wanted for Xmas, I suggested she find me Close’s memoir
which apparently wasn’t so simple,
it being sold out everywhere in inner-city Sydney,
and her having to order it down from a
Co-Op Bookshop in Lismore.
Sydney, as it happens,
is where much of this memoir of failed love
is set like a drunken jelly,
filling the beer fridge of the author’s regrets
and wobbling like a six-pack of semi-melancholy pentatonic solos,
but I digress...
Socrates said that the unexamined life wasn't worth living
so there's no doubt now that Close’s must be worth a fair bit
as he has got as near to examining it as much as is
humanly, or porpoisely for that purpose, possible -
Close has held every one of his
former lovers under a microscope
Close has bottled every
reptilian-brained reaction he's had
Close has taken all his faults
and pinned them to the flaking flesh of his chest,
then slowly examined the wounds with a dirty chopstick -
patiently as a Buddhist at a Western Suburbs bus stop.
Then Close has run around the old rooms of his mind,
only his brain, desk, and distrust of his own
ability to make a decision an ever constant presence,
be they bedsits in Bondi,
gargantuan share-houses in Glebe,
nights in beds of wild strangers in New York,
sweating fears of frigging his future in San Francisco
and bedding down, mentally, in his work-shed in Byron
all shaken up and skolled
like a $3 bottle of Passion Pop in a student loungeroom...
... ... Then publicly expunged over the balcony... ...
... Much of it hitting the page as little soiled peas of hindsight
glistening and reflecting my own mis-travelled life -
Myself, Benito, a man in the winter of his own 30s -
a time when Close’s protagonist is making
much of the same mistakes and
frigg-ups fuelled by fears of commitment
forever present in that long, happy hour of adolescence
that one just never knows how, or why, or whether to end
till it’s too late -
Welcome To The Inefficient Inner Workings
Of The Australian Male.
Okay,
it's all gets a little too New Agey for me near the end
but what do you expect of a Northern NSW fin?
Although, rubber on the other glove,
this could just be my own back-catalogue debasing.
Either way, his picture of a confused bachelor by then in his 40s
struggling away at the page,
living the writers’ life in a hot tin shed
before beers at The Rails
(back when the train home to Sydney
still ran past the bar no doubt)
feel as honestly vivid as his amorous mistakes
in the front of a car in Coogee,
a backyard barbecue in Bondi,
or a meandering though Manhattan, listening to Lou Reed
and slowly letting go of the hypothetical son ‘Jack’
that his lover and he leave behind in a family planning clinic in Amsterdam
and whose absence he regrets decades later, when it’s way too late,
as he sweats in the humility of an approaching old age
outside Mullumbimby
(where I myself once spent a weird week
with a wild-haired brunette artist named Kellie O’D
after a gig at said Rails and The Gollan in Lismore,
supporting Greg Sheehan, The Reel Gone Hick Ups
and The Porno Puppets From Prague, followed by
skinny-dipping on a German Doctor’s bamboo plantation
and drinking cheap Champagne to old Tom Waits LPs
but I digress...)
Close writes boldly, and without characteristic male reticence,
(male pattern boldness?)
of his desperate retreat into therapy back in Sydney
and his discoveries and sketches of his own archetypal issues
and the patterns he now perceives in his former partners’ familial misgivings
as well as his failure to become a parent
or even a sane man to be in a relationship with –
At these times reading “Before You Met Me” is like
standing by the road in a dream where you’re
watching the corpses being cut out of a car crash
only to recognise the remains of yourself in the driver’s seat
making you even more unable to
tear yourself away from this fascinating
panel beater’s report of a battered heart and
perhaps still only slightly patched-up psyche.
Oh brother’s in reptilian naivety -
It's not often someone gives us
such a fascinating account of what could very well be
own future misgivings -
which is why perhaps every man-jack of you bloke-offs should read this.
Oh sorella’s of mysterious softly flesh –
it's also not so often that an Australian male
ever opens up the workings of his hub like this,
for all sorts of sweet- smelling voyeurs to sift through
(in fact the author is at one point chided by a mate for
stepping publicly into such otherwise mysterious ‘mans’ business’,)
- which is why perhaps every woman should read this...
In short then,
something for the hole in your family.
Al, I dug it,
and look forward to the sequel...
Your sin celery,
BDF.
6/1/09
July 28, 2026
I identified with this memoir---a lot. The author went through some of the same processes that I did---not understanding for a long time why my relationships were not working. His honesty made this book very readable and relatable.
7.5/10
7.5/10
September 18, 2013
Really well written and honest account of an Australian male and his failed relationships. I did take a star off because of the baby stuff. To me, if he wanted a baby that badly, he wouldn't have aborted three of them. For the record,I am pro choice and I do not condemn Alan or the women for choices that were obviously painful and difficult,but given that history, I do find it irritating as a childfree (not childless) woman to be given the message that life is meaningless without children. Speak for yourself, Alan. Still, I applaud Alan's honesty and this is obviously his own personal truth.
This was enjoyable and I could relate to a lot of it, both from Alan and the women he was involved with over the years. I do hope his current relationship works and that he is able to continue to battle his demons.
This was enjoyable and I could relate to a lot of it, both from Alan and the women he was involved with over the years. I do hope his current relationship works and that he is able to continue to battle his demons.
July 28, 2011
A compelling, moving and thought-provoking memoir about an Aussie man's turbulent love life. Any man or woman who reads 'Before You Met Me' will find something - or several somethings - to relate to.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews