Overview
"The different among us tell our stories because we are all only human and so much need a witness to the truth," writes family therapist Claudia Bepko of her memoir, The Heart's Progress. She offers a unique glimpse into the growth of her own lesbian identity - what she calls her "spiritual path" - and a chronicle of one woman's singular experience that illuminates that of an entire generation of women who came of age before Stonewall.Bepko's story begins with a small-town, blue collar Catholic girlhood and an alcoholic father. The young Claudia ricochets between the strict serenity of the convent school and chapel and the regime of roiling anger laced with bitter silence she finds at home. She describes the exhilaration of her youthful friendships with the members of the school's Philosophers' Club. Entering college at the height of the sexual revolution, determined to become a nun, Claudia encounters her first lovers: Molly, a woman living down the hallway, and David, the man who would eventually become her husband.
Building a career in the early years of the women's movement, Claudia again and again questions her marriage and her identity as a heterosexual woman. When she meets Alice, she comes face to face with the passionate force that will anchor her life and her identity for nearly two decades. With, and later without, Alice, she comes to learn what it means to live as a lesbian in this culture - moving from an identity shrouded in otherness to a life that celebrates the strength and normalcy of loving whomever one is destined to love.
A new classic of lesbian experience, "a rare and unflinchingly honest story of love as it has never been told before."--Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger. Claudia Bepko is co-author of the bestselling Too Good for Her Own Good. 240 pp. Targeted ads & 6-city author tour.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Bepko's life seems not to be governed by any overriding principles, and there apparently have been no moments of epiphany to guide or inform it. From her difficult and alcoholic parents, through her Catholic schooling, her first love in college, her brief marriage and her 18-year relationship with a woman (and its eventual dissolution), the middle-aged coauthor of Too Good for Her Own Good, who divides her time between New York and Maine, takes things as they come. Unlike other books with similar subtitles, these are the memoirs not of an activist but of a woman who has had a moderately eventful and interesting life, and whose writing and narrative skills can do her story justice. Despite occasional, confusing time lapses and shifts, the book reads like a good, if unspectacular, novel, and manages a resolution as better than most. Its chief strength lies in its accessibility. Unlike many gay memoirs, and unlike with many gay activists, there is not the hint of a ghetto here. Bepko has been thoroughly integrated into society as a whole, and though this has not protected her from suffering various forms of discrimination, it does enable her to speak from a frame of reference near enough to the mainstream to give this book breakthrough potential. It is an intimate portrait, well written, well reasoned, by turns moving and distressing, only infrequently angry and always engaging. Author tour. (Apr.)Library Journal
Bepko, a feminist therapist and coauthor of several works, including Singing at the Top of Our Lungs (HarperCollins, 1993), here offers a memoir meant to shed light on contemporary lesbian life. Bepko's experiences as a lesbian in what were for her the not-so-radical Sixties and her analysis of her involvement in a fatal car crash are engaging. However, the detailed and torturous account of her 18-year relationship with "Alice" goes on far too long. Bepko does not discuss her professional life; nor does she shed light on the books she wrote or co-wrote, except in terms of her relationship with the coauthor. As a result, this memoir sometimes reads like a lesbian romance novel, in part because the stories of her loves have narrative resolution unusual for real life. The writing is clean, though, and Bepko has some name recognition, recommending this flawed work for medium to large public libraries or libraries with lesbian collections.-Melodie Frances, Univ. of San Francisco Lib.Kirkus Reviews
Though flawed, this is an emotionally honest and compelling memoir from the coauthor of Too Good for Her Own Good (1990).It chronicles the experience of a bleak family life in which both parents are alcoholics; her confused feelings as a young girl for a nun, then a priest; her passionless marriage to a man; coming to terms with loving women; her long, tempestuous, committed relationship to one woman, Alice, and that relationship's end; and the return of Bepko's long-lost college lover, Molly. Her perspective on love's conflicts is frank and complex; fights and inner turmoil are well-rendered, and she never makes herself look implausibly right. She chronicles some problems that have not been written about enough: the specific conflicts two women lovers can face when they work together, for example (she and Alice, both therapists, had a joint practice and wrote books together). She also describes deaths in her biological family—her grandmother, father, and mother—and, in one of the memoir's most affecting sections, describes a car crash in which she was responsible for another woman's death. However, some omitted parts of the story (though probably left out to protect people) leave glaring holes. Early on, for example, she alludes to Alice's being a recovering alcoholic; she never explains the impact this had on their relationship, yet when they break up, she makes the drinking central, declaring that she will stay away from anyone who has had a problem with alcohol. And sometimes she gives in too easily to conventional wisdom—uncritically spouting, for instance, the notion of "straight privilege" (that is, the privileges heterosexual women derive from "being with a successful man"), which many feminists recognize as complicated given the remaining social inequalities between men and women.
Though overly elliptical in parts, an admirable memoir of emotional struggle.