NECESSARY SINS, by Lynn Darling, The Dial Press, 233 pages, $24
Lynn Darling's memoir, "Necessary Sins," begins with a preface about her being 18 in the fall of 1968, a freshman at Harvard. She recalls discussing sex with the girls in the dorm.
She and her friends wanted no strings. They planned to have dozens of love affairs with men they didn't care about.
The preface to this book seems a bit ironic, given that the rest of the memoir is actually about Darling's marriage. But Darling apparently felt the need for a preface to show the reader that she began in a wild, free place. The contrast seems to have been intended to make the description of her marriage seem all the more miraculous.
In fact, though, she didn't need the set-up. The story of her marriage to Lee Lescaze is enough on its own. Her memoir eventually overcomes its beginnings because it is well-written, and because Darling offers such clear and honest insights.
Darling does create a few other barriers for the reader — as when her tendency toward hyperbole interrupts the flow of the narrative. For example: She writes that she'd never spent a night away without her parents until they dropped her off at college. The statement causes the reader to stop reading and to wonder, "What, no summer camps? No sleepovers?"
In other cases her exaggerations work better, as when she writes about the evening when she and Lescaze went for a drink after work. It was not their first after-work outing. But he was married and they had been conducting themselves as if they were nothing more than co-workers. Until, as she writes:
"What are we doing?" he asked abruptly.
"I don't know," I began. But I did know, had known all along, although until that moment I'd kept it a secret from myself. My stomach jumped, and I was aghast at the words I found myself saying, yet thrilled as well, as if diving off a cliff. "All I know is that I want to kiss you more than anything else in the world."
And then he leaned over the small table, pressing his tie to his chest with one hand, pulling my head towards his with the other, and I knew there had never been a kiss like that in the whole of history."
She was 23 at the time and new to her job as a reporter for the Washington Post. Her editors were not overly impressed with her. He was a veteran reporter, 20 years her senior, a former war correspondent, a father of three children. He had a lot more to lose than she did through the affair.
Darling's writing may not be perfect, but it is excellent. By the end of the book, she wins us completely. The reader has great sympathy for both Darling and Lescaze.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com