Marion Winik - First Comes Love

Acclaim forM ARION W INIKS
FIRST COMES LOVE

A beautifully wrought memoir of crazy infatuation that is remodeled by will into love, family life, and ultimately leave-taking.

Village Voice

A tragedy, acutely felt and told honestly by a wonderful writer.

New York Daily News

An honest book, in the way that people who have to step outside convention to create new systems, frameworks and family structures have to be honest, and Winik is about as strong a survivor as any Ive ever known on paper.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Relentless and powerful. A love letter of sorts to [Winiks] dead husband, Tony. Her prose beats like drums on a battle-field.

Seattle Times

By the time I finished reading this terrible-like-a-knife-held-to-ones-own-heart, brave and believably unbelievable story, I couldnt help askingGot any more?

Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

Vivid. [It] sweeps all before it, with headlong honesty and courage.

Entertainment Weekly

Honest, compelling, and provocative brilliant and moving.

Whitney Otto, author of How to Make an American Quilt

Winik tells [her] story with brutal honesty and humor. This compelling novel takes the reader through a gamut of emotions.

Newark Star-Ledger

Riveting both original and eloquent engrossing and very funny. First Comes Love is a hard book to read without crying.

Detroit Free Press

God, what a story, what a writer, what a book! Marion Winik blew me away. I read a lot of First Comes Love with my mouth hanging open in amazement, and then cried, and then cheered.

Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird

Nothing prepared me for First Comes Love. I was riveted and unable to put this book down. You will never see your own life quite the same way again.

Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country: A Doctors Story

Moving Winiks perseverance and painfully earned self-awareness are winning. A heartfelt recounting of a monumental loss.

Glamour

First Comes Love stands as a radiant example of personal writing at its finest. It transcends the inherent sensationalism of its subject to yield hard-won wisdom about the nature of human connection.

Newsday

Books byM ARION W INIK

Telling
First Comes Love

for Tony

Having observed that I have all my life acted more from the force of feeling than from my reflections, I have concluded that my conduct has depended more on my character than on my mind, after a long struggle in which I have alternately found myself with too little intelligence for my character and too little character for my intelligence.

G IACOMO C ASANOVA , History of My Life

T ony has never looked more beautiful than he does right now, sleeping, his features sculpted and glowing by the light of the candles. They are the Mexican kind, in tall glasses, two white and two blue as he requested, arranged in a semicircle around our wedding photograph: my gauzy veil, his spiky hair, our wide, giddy smiles. Under the edge of the pictures vermilion frame, he has slipped another photo, a dreamy-looking sepia-tone postcard of a woman dancing that someone gave him on his birthday in the hospital last month; she seems only half there, as if she had turned the corner into another dimension.

On the lower shelf of the night table, there are two goblets of red wine, still full, along with Tonys rimless eyeglasses, which I just took off for him. The table is one of a pair he bought at an estate sale, then stripped and painted and drizzled with wavy lines of pink and white painta typical Tony home improvement project in that it took almost a year and he ran out of paint before he finished all the boomerang-shaped decks. Its twin stands on the other side of the bed, a firm and lovely king-size model that we acquired when I was pregnant with Vince and damned if I would go through another pregnancy on that old futon of ours. Flanked by these tables, the bed has always reminded me of the Starship Enterprise, about to take off for the final frontier.

I have been watching Tony sleep for almost twelve years, on and off, since the early days when I was so keyed up and hungry that at night I lay wide-eyed beside him, gazing at him, examining him, drinking and eating him with my eyes. In the morning, I would wake up first, make coffee, come back to bed to look some more. I filled sketchbooks with drawings of him sleeping. The dark lashes against the cheek, the long arm thrown out against the pillow, the fingers curled slightly toward the palm. Years later, I took a series of photographs of him napping with Hayes; in the first, a few days after Hayess birth, they are sleeping on the lambskin baby spread together and there is that arm again, the baby no longer than the distance from wrist to elbow.

When you think how much of a persons beauty is in their eyes, it is astonishing how beautiful they can be with them closed in sleep, perhaps as when you suddenly notice how talented the members of a chorus line are once the stars of the show have left the stage. Finally, you can look at something else. His hair, for instance, cut the way I like it best, long in front, short at the sides and back. We call it the dont-ever-change do because he alternates between this and more extreme cuts, and whenever he returns to this look, my mother and her friends at the club say, Dont ever change. It is beautiful hair, thick and shiny, a sandy forelock jutting forward and slanting down almost into his eyes. Hes been complaining of its falling out and changing texture from the medication, but I dont see it, only that the color didnt lighten this year because he didnt spend that much time outside. Normally, his hair bleaches almost blond every summer, the color it was when he was a boy, the color Hayess and Vinces is now.

The boys look so much like him, especially Hayes; Ive seen a picture of Tony at nine, ice-skating on a pond, that could easily be our son. Hayes doesnt quite have the eyebrows yet, the thick, dark Italian brows Tony inherited from his mother. Beneath them, Tonys closed eyelids are shadowy and delicate, almost waxen, set deep in the rim of bone. The long planes of his cheeks are made of coarser stuff, less than smooth since the last shave, and I know just how they move, how they crease when he smiles, how they suck in when he smokes, how they work when he is angry, and all this is there in their stillness.

His nose is perfect, long but not too long, thin but not too thin, with a slight boyish lift at the tip, and some of this is thanks to the miracle of plastic surgery. When we met, our nose jobs were just another of the many amazing things we had in common. His was broken in a fight at a New Orleans movie theater years before I met him, over a parking space, I believe.