In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Amy Bloom and Brian Ameche were a handsome couple. I know this not because there's a photograph of them in Bloom's new memoir ... I know this because I was so moved by Bloom's bittersweet, truth-dealing book that I looked them up and read whatever I could find ... I'm not sure why I hadn't until now read Bloom's fiction. Maybe her soft, generic titles...were a deterrent. The title of this memoir is similar ... Not reading her: my loss. Bloom has one of those warm, wised-up, tolerantly misanthropic New York voices, in the manner of Laurie Colwin and Sloane Crosley and Allegra Goodman and Nora Ephron, and an ability to deepen her tone at will. I am not, as are these writers, Jewish. But when I read them I feel I've found my people ... Bloom tells this story with grace and tact. Scenes of their trip to Zurich are shuffled with scenes from their courtship and marriage ... There are a lot of tears in this memoir ... Part of what makes this book moving is Bloom's toughness. She's a mama bear, in the right ways. She doesn't go overboard in explaining her moral reasoning. She doesn't have to. Her title is her explanation."