Venus as She Ages Collection

In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves two stories into a seamless narrative - a woman's quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father. Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult, in one of her father's haunts, she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her distrust of affection? Walley's daring prose style allows the writer to make Charlee's rough but endearing past immediate and vital in her present. "I often think the truth," Charlee supposes, "was that my father lost me in a card game. He was losing; indeed, he lost everything. The men are all sitting around the bar, and this card game is a secret, all-consuming vice of my father's. He will do anything to keep in the game. And he says, 'Okay, I've got nothing except my daughter. When she's eighteen, you can have her. You can take her and do whatever the hell you like.'" Populated with tough, brilliant characters who crisscross New England, Strings Attached is a novel about the search for love, about the possibilities and impossibilities of that quest. Walley says, "These searching characters fall away and toward each other, as we do in every love affair, and come to their ultimate truths."

The "I" is a woman who is deliberating getting married to her boyfriend and is frightened. Her childhood has made her distrust union. She has a friend who has just gone to jail for growing marijuana. He has been a war hero, an artist, is good looking, a womanizer. She begins to visit him, because he is trapped like she is, and he gives her advice on love and herself. She begins to listen. He is the one who is "free" to her. In listening to him, she begins to itemize her own crimes in love. She marries her boyfriend, out of friendship, but the marriage feels doomed to her because the prisoner's mind is lodged inside her. She has to come to where she belongs and what is freedom to her.

This is a book about longing and how three people have to break through their respective prisons, whether literal or metaphoric. David, a man, in actual prison for growing marijuana longs for her and has to deal with being in prison. Peter, her husband, is in the prison of not being loved enough by a wife who is obsessed with freedom. And Mira, the wife, feels that marriage is a prison for her and only being herself will make her free. She creates a situation where they all get to break their binds. quote: Mira looks away and can't make sense of this or herself. All she knows is that she is rising, rising with desire everywhere, it's starting to overtake her, her desire for allurement, sexuality, for love, lust, oranges, sand, toes, sandals. It's rising up in her and god knows what will happen if she allows this desire to rise and overtake her, she will start throwing things out of cupboards, she will scream, scream to be loved, she will feel her breasts against her clothes all the time calling to be touched, her sex wet, bedeviling her, time rushing as she stays still. What she does instead is run her hand primly over the hem of her print dress.

This is a story of an anguished love affair between two adult children (Ariel and Mira) of holocaust survivors who cannot get their parents' pain out of themselves. But his anger, his volatility leads her to a kinder gentler Englishman, Michael. However, she cannot accept his goodness, nor what appears to be a dullness compared to the wildness of Arieh. They become involved in a triangle and the seemingly cuckolded man goes mad and wants to punish the woman with a vengeance that is almost Nazi-ish. She takes it because she feels she deserves it, having been treated badly by her survivor mother, although she doesn't deserve this kind of rage. But she knows it is born of pain, a pain familiar to her. She knows shet has to confront her past. "'It's because of me,' Arieh said, 'that you don't want to be alone anymore.' And maybe that was true. I had had to confront myself with him. The messiness of it, all that need that welled up in me. It had nearly killed me but not sublimating those needs had freed me to be real, to desire." These two understand each other's backstory and what has made them impossible in love, till they finally break through and she can purchase a new bed to lie in and live in her truth.

Marguerite Duras and Jean Rhys come back to life to help a hapless modern day writer rewrite herself in love and work. The title harkens back to Duras' novel and film, "Destroy, she said". Mira, the main character, a writer, has a kind of magical realism experience with these two 20th century writers who come back to life as she steps through a mirrored glass to meet Jean Rhys in a bar and Marguerite Duras on a park bench. With ethereal credit cards they whisk her off to Vienna to heal that Jewish heritage, to teach her about life, love and writing, and to open her to new love with an oboe player. It's as though they want her to know that love comes and goes, experiment, don't be afraid, but all the while keep perfecting the craft of the writing, what Walley exudes as, "The private lives of sentences." quote: These women are insistent. And why are they helping me, I wondered. Was a returning Dickens arriving right now in Los Angeles to help Robert Ludlum? He didn't seem to need much help. Tolstoy must have come and gone in helping David Grossman, his last novel had the Russian genius' imprimatur. Who is Virginia Woolf with right now? [...] And if that is not the immediate case, then why have they chosen me out of all the writers, so many of us now, clicking away at laptops, even phones? I decided, and perhaps this speaks more of my personality than truth, that they chose me because I was a particular brand of nomad, like them. I was not an intellectual in the Upper West Side academic sense. I had always been on the margins, hurt, a stranger in a strange land, like they (émigrés), rejected by parents, longing, longing for love, and this, this had been our material. Also their careers were saved at the last minute, and so perhaps they chose me for that hopeful ending.

An older woman on a quest to find her eros and to be desired. A woman over sixty wants her sexuality, her eros back. It opens with the main character going on a date alone, walks herself along the High Line in New York, shops for a book at The Strand and goes to hear Mahler. She remembers the past when she had that juiciness, and she finds lovers in the present, but something is amiss. She has a friendship with a female holocaust survivor who lives upstairs, who has that eros, even over 80, just in her being. The older woman dies, but in the lessons she leaves behind, the narrator finally finds that eros within her attitude toward life. Lucia looked down at her newspaper. 'Your real problem is you have a boyfriend who doesn't want to kiss you.'