In Love, and all that jazz, Laurie Lewis again shines the clear light of memory on a time of glorious beginnings and hard consequences.
In Love, and all that jazz, Laurie Lewis again shines the clear light of memory on a time of glorious beginnings and hard consequences. At the end of her previous memoir, Little Comrades, it’s the year 1952 and the young Laurie is newly married in New York City. But everything is about to change.
Laurie jumps into a wonderfully happy new life with the brilliant, Manhattan-cool, and dangerously charming Gary Lewis. Gary’s idealism and longing for poetry in art, life and love are inseparable from his passionate attachment to the jazz scene. It is the time of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Zoot Sims, among others. Gary’s days and nights become a sleepless, drug-and-alcohol-fuelled, nonstop celebration. Laurie is soon forced to run, escaping back to Canada with her child.
Laurie, now a single mother and creating a new life for herself in publishing, discovers the freedom and peace of mind that self-reliance can bring. Love, and all that jazz, can bring defeat. A declaration of independence, on the other hand, can build an exhilarating new existence. It may mean that love can persevere.