Richard Ward’s friends comment on BKM

Wow, what a story - a profound lifelong entanglement.  

You think it’s Meet Corliss Archer. Then Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Then Dostoyevsky—though no one gets murdered.

What’s best about the book is recalling the feelings of intelligent teenagers.

Ugly, ugly. Our dear Rick wanted revenge.

Your father’s book/memoir, which I finally finished – in fact stayed up most of a night doing so – is really a wonderful thing.  Such courage for him to write it!  You should be very proud.  The writing is really excellent, completely drew me in; usually I have NO emotional response to these kinds of pieces, don’t read them.  And I don’t think it’s because it so acutely evoked my own memories of that strange time – though perhaps to a degree, I suppose. My obsession with my high school love was NOTHING like his, not so emotion-filled, or heart-breakingly one-sided as his became. (Thus his courage in writing it.) Granted, he’s a very different, way more dislikable character, but I felt much of the same sadness that Nabokov’s Humbert elicited in me at the end of that astounding book.  Now that’s high praise!!!!!

          On finishing it, I’ll admit to some fairly bad depression for a couple of weeks afterwards. (Thus the tardiness of this note.) Yes, the unrequited aspect; but primarily that clearly conveyed sense of the unfulfilled, unaccomplished life when measured against my own (and Rick’s) youthful belief in what I/we were meant to do. That painful nostalgia, at times became almost overwhelming.  That is something that has always tortured me when I allow it to – it has greater power now, certainly, as I get closer to death. Another, though not pleasant, result of such evocative writing.    

          That’s really all I have to say, I do hope it’s enough to make clear my enormous respect for what your dad accomplished here.

Oh, God! He brings it all back.  Wasn’t once enough?

The poor bastard.  I had no idea.

A terrific read—but unfair to Beca. Publishing her letters!  But they’re terrific. She wrote better at 17 than I did into my 40’s.

It’s about sexual innocence and initiation (“pretty graphic,” as Beca says), but also about becoming a writer. 

I can imagine that, for young readers now who might read BKM, the long-term obsession with Beca, the requited and then unrequited love, frustrated sexuality, etc., including the protracted passages on the sometimes fumbling attempts to move up the sexual ladder, so to speak, with her, would seem to come from another time and another planet. But that was also the world I grew up in, and as I read the book’s moving conclusion, I realized that many of my demons also stem from that time.  And as Rick states very matter-of-factly towards the end, the whole problem was probably mostly a matter of unfulfilled sex (I'm paraphrasing since I can't find the passage).  In my case, I also realized late in life that I probably could have avoided many long term problems with women if - to put it bluntly - I'd only gotten laid more in my teens and early twenties and had avoided my rather puritanical obsession with the sexual act in relationships.  

Moral: don’t lose touch with your first love—you’ll always regret it.

I certainly recognized the time which Rick wrote about so well. Those years of first love were so bittersweet for me in terms of emotions and feelings. I seem to remember every detail. All the letters, the meetings, the sneaking about, the hope that was ahead, etc. I hope the writing helped Rick come to terms, closure, whatever it was he was looking for.

The book is brilliant at evoking puppy love in the 1950s.

I'm hearing Connie Francis.  "Who's Sorry Now."  

I want you to know first and foremost that I think your father has written a very brave and compelling book. As he mentions in it, there are numerous accounts in American literature of characters living in thrall to a romantic obsession (Gatsby, et al), but few, I believe, that have been recounted in such exquisite and excruciating detail. 

       Having been told by Larry the general outline of the story, I had expected to find it very sexy and exciting in the early part and then perhaps to lose some steam during the adult years and maybe degenerate into pages and pages of rambling “squirrel-cage” obsessive introspection and retrospection as it went along. So the biggest (and most pleasant) surprise for me was to find the second half of the book even more engrossing and lively than the first. Not only did the psychology become more intriguing and complex, but, to my ear, the writing itself became sharper as well. 

       As it happened, I came to Beca Kissed Me straight from reading Margaret Atwood’s The Cat’s Eye, itself a first-person memoirish story about an early relationship that colors an entire life. I’d been particularly impressed by her masterful descriptions of the look and feel of the narrator’s physical world--geography, weather, architecture, etc. While I understand that your father's book is meant to be much more sharply focussed on the interior landscapes of its characters than on the external world (and while I was amused by his narrator’s testy little diatribe against the perfunctory accumulation of descriptive prose), I very much appreciated his evocation of the look and feel of that long-ago world of the first half of the book, especially in the summer sections, which, having spent many of my own summers in that region, I found superbly rendered. 

        If I had to mention anything I had a hard time with it would be the end. . . . 

        In any event, I thank you very much for a moving, gripping and thought-provoking read, which I’ve been recommending left and right to others, especially those from your father's and my own old time and place.

  

[A woman who had a brief affair with Richard and remained close to him wrote a series of e-mails to him as though he were still alive]

         You need to know I am reading your book like I read the Bible to my paralyzed friend - a few pages at a time while drying off after my daily swim.  I am chewing each bite 20 times.  I love every word and it tells me much which I wish we’d discussed. I hope your shrink read it.  I love you.

         I marvel not just at your saga but at the visual palate and details like the color of her sweater, the fabric of her skirt or whatever the attending details. I'm convinced you actually remember them rather than made them up. I'm fascinated by the lifelong obsession that made you remember.

         I'm 50% through it and as I told you before, am savoring every word.  It is so magnificent, so raw and yet so intellectual and lofty.  You have covered the range between an obsession with the most basic animal concerns to the highest analysis of every nuance of the inner heart and soul of youth.  It is wonderful, and the only thing lost are the humdrum everyday concerns that occupy the middle, that normally take up the majority of one's existence. With concerns on each end of the pole, it is not hard to see why a median or compromising existence for you could not thrive. I have seen so many people caught in relationships that do not match their secret aspirations, hopes and dreams.  I have always preferred nothing rather than the frustration of wanting more but being limited or imprisoned by invisible walls in the form of my mate.

         Now I have to go home, dress, and receive a house guest while I will secretly be longing to get back to your saga.  I think it is appropriate that I only read you while trying to evaporate after a dip in the shockingly chilly waters of the unconscious, which are spring fed, you know, and pure.

         It really is damn good, you sad man. It's so damn good I don't want to finish it.  I'm doing taxes and having relatives visit, so I'm going to be able to drag it out well into spring. I cannot tell you what it is doing to me. I'm getting in on where the minds and hearts of those young fledgling lovers were, from a male perspective. I was raised and arrived in high school with identical mores to yours.  It wasn't until the year I graduated from college, 1969, when the new wave of the sexual revolution made it to the East Coast -- remember how the prevailing winds blew over from the west, and the lag time was not weeks or months but years.  After that it was like stepping from a two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional world, where nothing was the same ever again. You so well describe those earlier times which seem positively Victorian and ever so much more cerebral, which truth be told were much more delicious in so many ways. 

         I am astonished at Beca's written words at such a tender age, and it makes me so nostalgic for the truly educated young (or old) person, one who can express complex notions in the simplest and most imaginative ways.  And then there's your writing, which in a contemporary way to express it, blows me away. It's such a beautiful tale of a first love -- insecurity, attraction, repulsion, inexperience, uncertainty, and passion, hesitancy, and youth.  I love it and you all the more for it.

         I am freaking out.  I have reached the end and now am on the addendum.  I don't know what I am going to do now.  Did you leave another [book]?  Good god, you write beautifully. I'm sorry it's all true, that your story is not fiction.  

         This has been the best slow read I have ever had. I've made friends with your entire youth. I'm sick to death that she finally rejected any contact whatsoever, and I’m sure she is too, now that you’re gone and contact is forever impossible. You know her keeping you away was just because you were too close to her. My god. You were the same! It's just that she handled the loss differently.

         So sad you’re not here to be praised.