Bed/Time/Story

I randomly picked this up somehow as a teenager, probably from a library sale. Like many of the 60s era memoirs or works of semi-autobiographical fiction I stumbled into, it left a strong impression on me: for its unflinching honesty about female sexuality; for the vision of permissiveness and adult freedom I took from the talk of sex, drug use and cross-country moves; for its portrayal of a man as physically beautiful, emotionally connected, cherished – in short, allowing him to have a role as an object of love, in a way that most literary canon I'd been exposed to only spoke of women.

This was also pre-internet days, and any glimpse, however doomed or tawdry, of certain subjects was more precious to me than gold. Robinson's sexual encounters with women intrigued me, and so did her allusion (never elaborated upon) of other characters in her head.

I remembered this book, essentially, as a beautiful love story – one in which the love and connection between two people conquers the odds.

Re-reading it as an adult, I find myself more struck by the dysfunctional and codependent qualities of their relationship. I find myself angry at Jill for allowing him to treat her the way that he did, for continually forgiving his absences and abuses, for essentially becoming a caretaker for an adult man at the expense of her own two children. I wanted her to take more agency over her own life, to set boundaries. I saw the encounter with Laurie and his ex-wife, and her subsequent adoration of Nadia, in a very different light.

And on the whole I'm far less likely to see it as “romantic” when two people mistreat each other, even unintentionally, even when the people they really intend to mistreat are themselves.

But I think I got more out of this as a historical document and as an insight into a woman's life in the 60s, as I now have a lot more context for things like Esalen.

I can't find anything online about what happened to Laurie; he's conspicuously absent from her online bios. [Update: Laurie's real name was Jeremiah, and they divorced in 1977.] The book was published in 1974, and according to Wikipedia, she married someone else in 1980. It sounds as if their relationship itself did not survive sobriety or its conversion into memoir, or both.

I found this a very interesting re-read, in the end, if only because it showed the vast difference in experience and understanding between myself-then and myself-now.