First Comes Love - by Marion Winik (Paperback)

About the Book

From National Public Radio commentator Marion Winik, author of "Telling", comes a memoir of breathtaking candor--an affecting yet rigorously unsentimental story of the extraordinary passion between a straight woman and a gay man. "Decidedly unfaint-hearted".--"The New York Times Book Review".

Book Synopsis

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by longtime All Things Considered commentator and author of The Glen Rock Book of the Dead charts the trajectory of a marriage so impossible that it became inevitable.

"Gritty, funny, moving, horrific, outrageous--and, above all, fearlessly honest.... ultimately a joyous story." --Newsday

When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she was straight and he was gay. But Marion and Tony's impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful sons, true enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and the AIDS that would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after they met.

Review Quotes

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"Gritty, funny, moving, horrific, outrageous--and, above all, fearlessly honest.... ultimately a joyous story." --Newsday

Decidedly unfaint-hearted... Marion Winik is resilient, hardy, unfazable; this self-described suburban wannabe is a frontier woman in disguise." --The New York Times Book Review

"A true story stripped of fine writing or cheap analysis.... I won't be the only reader who can't put it down." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Beautiful ... intense and intimate." --Washington Post Book World

About the Author

MARION WINIK is heard regularly on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." She was the recipient of a 1993 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and has been voted Favorite Local Writer by the readers of the Austin Chronicle for four consecutive years. First Comes Love won the Violet Crown Award for Best Book by an Austen Writer, 1996, from the Austen Writer's League. The author of Telling, she lives in Austin, Texas, with her two sons.