Venus as She Ages Collection

Raised on a bar stool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult in one of her father's haunts, she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her distrust of affection?

The I is a woman who is deliberating getting married to her boyfriend and is frightened. Her childhood has made her distrust union. She has a friend who has just gone to jail for growing marijuana. He has been a war hero, an artist, is good-looking, a womanizer. She begins to visit him, because he is trapped like she is, and he gives her advice on love and herself. She begins to listen. He is the one who is free to her. In listening to him, she begins to itemize her own crimes in love. She marries her boyfriend, out of friendship, but the marriage feels doomed to her.

This is an audiobook about longing and how three people have to break through their respective prisons, whether literal or metaphoric. David, a man in actual prison for growing marijuana, longs for her and has to deal with being in prison. Peter, her husband, is in the prison of not being loved enough by a wife who is obsessed with freedom. And Mira, the wife, feels that marriage is a prison for her and only being herself will make her free. She creates a situation where they all get to break their binds.

This is a story of an anguished love affair between two adult children (Ariel and Mira) of Holocaust survivors who cannot get their parents' pain out of themselves. But his anger and his volatility lead her to a kinder, gentler Englishman, Michael. However, she cannot accept his goodness, nor what appears to be a dullness compared to the wildness of Ariel. They become involved in a love triangle, and the seemingly cuckolded man goes mad and wants to punish the woman. She takes it because she feels she deserves it, having been treated badly by her survivor mother.

The title harkens back to Duras' novel and film, Destroy, She Said. Mira, the main character, a writer, has a kind of magical realism experience with these two 20th century writers who come back to life as she steps through a mirrored glass to meet Jean Rhys in a bar and Marguerite Duras on a park bench.