What We Do For Love

What We Do For Love, Ilene Beckerman, Algonquin Books, 1997

Here is the true story of one person's search for that elusive thing called love. Beckerman talks of things familiar to many women. She talks of sneaking out of the house to go necking with her high-school boyfriend. Her first marriage, while in college, was to one of her college professors, a marriage that he ended. She checked herself into a psycho ward, and got a divorce in mexico on her twenty-third birthday. She met what was to be Husband #2 at the ad agency where she worked. That marriage produced several children before divorce, but unofficially ended when their second child, an eighteen-month old named David, died unexpectedly. She also deals with the death of her father, who walked out on the family when Beckerman was little. She has an affair with a rather plain man named Stanley; he becomes Husband #3 when he gets a divorce, and she and Al (Husband #2) finally stop what actually stopped a long time previously.

This memoir is humorous and poignant, touching and original and very much worth reading.