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Overview
Looking for love isn't easy, and it's never what you expect. In What We Do For Love, Ilene ("Gingy") Beckerman tells her funny, sometimes heartbreaking story, a story that every woman who's ever searched for love will recognize. The first crush. The phone call that doesn't come. The makeovers after the breakups. And the exchange of marriage vows.
With poignant prose and drawings, Beckerman looks back on a lifetime of trying to find true love. She remembers sneaking out of the house to neck with her high school boyfriend, dancing cheek-to-cheek with her first husband, and settling down with her second husband--but even he is not the man of her dreams. Through it all, Gingy Beckerman holds on to the possibility that there might be someone out there who's just right for her. And, as it turns out, there is-- "I never would have expected when I was a senior in high school that I wouldn't find love until I was practically a senior citizen."
What We Do For Love is a moving, humorous reminder that when it comes to love almost anything is possible.
Synopsis
Looking for love isn't easy, and it's never what you expect. WHAT WE DO FOR LOVE is a reminder of how true that is. Unlucky in love herself, "Gingy" Beckerman shows us there is always reason to keep trying. "Recaptures in words and line drawings young love in all its glorious agony and possibility."--Glamour; "Charmingly written and illustrated . . . this savory little truffle turns out to be surprisingly poignant, laced with the bitter, the rueful, and the sweet." --Good Housekeeping; "This book would make a perfect gift from a woman to her best woman friend."--Chattanooga Free Press. A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB selection.
Publishers Weekly
Beckerman achieved a small but loyal cult following with her 1995 book, "Love, Loss, and What I Wore", which constructed a memoir of her life as a young adult in the 1950s and 1960s from remembrances of wearing specific outfits. In What We Do for Love, employing the same keen observational skills and quoting freely from old love letters written to her, she probes deeper, laying bare the details of the series of relationships she has had with men over the years. Humor works as a disarming foil for Beckerman; she depicts herself as a naive adventurer who allowed men to take advantage of her, in part thanks to the mores and customs of the day.