[While searching for an agent to represent my novel Love Rhymes, I discovered some who asked for a synopsis. As part of a contest submission, for $33.50, I received a critique of my first 3000 words and the synopsis. The later proved thought-provoking, so I re-wrote what I had, and present it here.]
In 1983, during remission from several years of fighting cancer, Sarah Jane Stein receives a box of memorabilia, letters, and poems from her mother. She begins to look back on the time she came of age in the late sixties. Janie uses her teenage diary to reminisce about her long-lasting connection to a reticent but motivated young man, Michael Harrison. Thus begins a nostalgic ride from Cincinnati to Martha’s Vineyard, Ivy League colleges, Vietnam War protests, ending with road trips to Colorado and California. Around her swirl cultural icons such as J.D . Salinger, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Betty Friedan and Anais Nin.
As class valedictorian, Janie has been grinding away at Avondale High School towards an Ivy League college. Entranced by the hands and face of a boy in her French class junior year, she finds a way to his heart by supporting his championship debate team. They discover the joy and trauma of love together and apart. After a dizzying spring and summer getting to know each other, Mike leaves for college. Their long-distance romance stagnates until Mike joins Janie at her family’s summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, where she teaches him to sail and enjoy beach life.
Arriving at Radcliffe College in 1967, she finds new friends who expand her interests towards the political turmoil of resistance to the Vietnam War. With her older brother Charlie, she attends the Students for a Democratic Society demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago, 1968. She is injured when the protest turns violent. Mike is hesitant to join her, sparking the first crack in their relationship as she feels his absence when she needed him most. While there, she meets Howard Lehrman, with whom she is later re-acquainted during the student strike at Harvard in the spring of 1969. Though Howard is attracted to her, she decides she is a “serial monogamist” and initially spurns his advances.
Classes in developmental psychology and women’s literature introduce her to the wonders of mother-baby bonding and spark a feminist awakening. She spends many evenings with her friends at school pondering life’s great questions engaging in what she calls “sophomoric philosophizing”. This adds to the developing tension between Mike and Janie. Through her junior year in college, Mike keeps dropping in and out of her life, showering her with poetry and his incessant sense of fun. Janie slowly realizes that, while she loves Mike’s mind and his body, and admires his ambition to become a psychiatrist, she feels more and more uncomfortable with what she sees as his juvenile obsessions of swimming and skiing.
Graduating early, Mike spends the winter of his senior year as a ski bum in Colorado. Janie takes the opportunity to reconnect with Howard. Recognizing she still hasn’t escaped from Mike’s charms, she leaves Howard to spend spring break in Colorado with Mike. When he departs for medical studies on the West Coast, she travels on one last road trip with him, allowing her to be the one who gets out of their bed and leaves him behind.
Writing in 1983, she reveals in a series of “flash forwards” her devastating leukemia diagnosis. During remission from the illness, she falls in love with a refugee psychoanalyst, Petyr Cohen. Following his divorce, they agree to marry at the end of May, 1984. She dies just before their wedding date.
Throughout their time together, Mike expresses his love and frustration with Janie in poems, especially on each of her birthdays from sixteen to twenty-one. The Epilogue finds Mike at her gravesite in Cambridge, finally coming to terms with the anger and sadness he felt after their parting, writing one final poem for her.