THE LONG HALF-LIFE OF LOVE

The Long Half-Life of Love made me think of sophisticated and probing memoirs by Patti Smith and Mary Karr and, in its powerful mother-daughter portrait, called to mind Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. (Stephanie Sinclair)

Do our memories of our first loves ever fade? For most of us, those memories retain a powerful hold and remain an influence on who we are throughout our lives. The Long Half-Life of Love begins with the author, in mid-life, deciding to revisit her adolescent love, Robbie. Thanks to the internet, thousands of people are rekindling relationships with important people from their pasts and sometimes – as in Epstein's case – opening up a rich and forgotten world.
Helen Epstein is the daughter of Czech refugees from Communism. Her reconnection with Robbie, the gifted and troubled son of blacklisted American Communists leads her to come to terms with the shocking truths she had avoided for most of her life. These include her mother's long and passionate affair with her nanny's husband, and this man's sexual abuse of the author as a small child. When Helen and Robbie suspect what underlies their own excavation of the past, they do not break off their collaboration. Instead, they embark on a journey to piece her story together, helping Epstein understand and come to terms with her intimate history.
A veteran journalist, Epstein relies on her professional research prowess and her interviewing/ transcribing skills to help her stay grounded during the process of investigation. As victims of assault or abuse can attest, recurrent self-doubt and the elusiveness of memory are one's worst enemies. Facts require repeated verification and can resemble footprints disappearing in sand. But with Robbie and, later, her therapist Dr. M, as allies, Epstein is steadfast in her search for clarity. In The Long Half-Life of Love, the author brings us into to the workings of trauma and recovery without cliché or jargon. In reading this memoir I learned as much as I witnessed, something which is not always the case.
Helen Epstein is the author, co-author or translator of ten books of literary non-fiction. They include the ground-breaking Children of the Holocaust, one of the first books to examine the inter-generational transmission of trauma; the biography Joe Papp: An American Life; and the memoir Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for HerMother's History. All were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York, The New Yorker, ARTnews and other magazines. She now reviews books regularly for the New England online magazine The Arts Fuse. Epstein was the first tenured women professor of journalism at New York University and in 2010, she co-founded Plunkett Lake Press eBooks which re-issues classics of non-fiction in electronic form.