Commentary

In the “Author’s Note” to A Postcard Memoir, Lawrence Suttin claims that his memoir,  based on photos of people he does not know, borrowed names, made-up details, in places where he has not been, is emotionally true.  “All the desires and the parts where I get disoriented are real.” In this memoir of his desires he meets a woman who looks just like his first love and fantasizes about them reading books together “and “kissing with the slow, precise passion reserved for the spiritually chaste” though she had another boyfriend and his love remained unrequited. He met her postcard look-alike, pictured here leaning against a tree, years later in the Hebrew University library, and after “shy visits” to her apartment eventually began kissing her “for hours” while her “black hair fell over [his] face, a robe of initiation.” This love would not last. He made the mistake of peeking into her diary and grew jealous when he read of a “young, dark, Israeli soldier” who had seduced her before they met “with sizzling ease.” After their split, he entered a period of risk taking, “of travel, friends, drugs, attitudes that twisted harder than drugs,” passing time, believing in nothing. But desire remained. He still loved the frieze of Venus’ breasts which have “the delicious throb of wings, the fragrance of milk, lemon blossoms, and blood, the softness stone has when shaped into breasts.” He fell in love with the woman who would become his wife in his adult writing class. She knew he did not have a girlfriend because he wore “orange socks,” and he fell for “her draping fair hair, paled blue eyes and rosy mystic calm after sex.” In this made-up book of real desires, he writes that “I had the sense of having slipped into a garden I’d never seen and yet suddenly belonged in.”

—THE