The Love of My Youth

The Love of My Youth (2011), a novel by American author Mary Gordon, follows two successful middle-aged Americans, Miranda and Adam, who fell in love in high school but haven’t seen each other since they were in their twenties. Reunited by chance in Rome, Miranda and Adam discuss aging, art, their happy marriages to other people, and wonder about what might have been. The novel was praised by the New York Times as “emotionally engaging and smoothly flowing.” Gordon’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an O. Henry Award.

Miranda—an epidemiologist from Berkeley who specializes in mold and other environmental threats—is in Rome for a conference. Finding herself alone one evening, she accepts an invitation from a hapless friend, Valerie, to dine with Adam, the high-school boyfriend whom she has not seen since he broke her heart in 1971.

Gordon lets us into the points of view of both characters as they prepare for the dinner. Miranda realizes that she still feels “Bitterness. Pride. Grievance.” about Adam’s betrayal of her for his first wife, Beverly, even though she knows that Beverly committed suicide. Meanwhile, Adam remembers with frustration that in the last years of their relationship he could never get her attention: she was too busy with political activism to care about his idealistic devotion to playing classical piano.



At the dinner, Miranda learns that Adam’s enormous musical ambition has come to little: he teaches music at a private school. Instead, his ambition has attached to his eighteen-year-old daughter. He is in Rome because she has a grant to study music here. The girl’s mother is his second wife, much younger than the late Beverly. Miranda, too, is happily married, to an Israeli doctor, and has two sons, both engaged in charitable good works.

As a gesture of reconciliation, Adam—whose family is Italian—offers to serve as Miranda’s guide to the city during their trip. He recalls that when they visited as a couple in 1969 they were too drunk with love and sex to see many of the sights. Miranda is hesitant: “What, she wonders, is at stake in his offer?”

Each ensuing chapter takes place at one of Rome’s famous attractions: Trastevere, the Piazza Navona, the Capitoline, the Borghese Gardens.



They discuss the indignity of aging, of entering what Miranda calls the “age of embarrassment”: “What a strange thing it is, embarrassment, so powerful, yet no one acknowledges it as one of the important human states.”

They also discuss their youthful relationship, while Gordon fills in the detail as backstory. We learn that Miranda and Adam met in high school, when Adam, already a talented pianist, accompanied Miranda’s audition for the glee club. She sang a ballad cribbed from Joan Baez’s repertoire: “Plaisir d’amour / Endure qu’un moment / Chagrin d’amour endure / La vie” (“The joys of love / Are but a moment long / The pain of love endures / Your whole life long”).

They fell passionately in love, united by their separate idealisms: Miranda’s for radical politics; Adam’s for music. They met each other’s families, began a sexual relationship, and went to college together. They and their parents assumed that in time they would marry one another.



In Rome, we learn how the couple’s youthful tendencies have played out. Miranda’s political idealism has become self-righteous political correctness. She tries “to live an ethical life,” but enjoys a level of luxury that she would once have condemned. Adam’s commitment to music has left him unworldly, abrupt, and precious about the arts. As they contemplate a Bernini sculpture, Adam enthuses about the artist’s commitment to perfection. Miranda scolds him for using the arts to justify his unhealthy perfectionism, a trait he has forced on his daughter.

At first, Miranda keeps telling herself that she isn’t still angry and aggrieved: “It is not the case that he was my one true love…Only that he was my first.” Later, she admits that she is still angry and rebukes herself for it: “How ridiculous, she thinks, keeping alive the grievances of nearly half a century.”

In the backstory, we learn how their youthful relationship ended with Adam clumsily and tactlessly betraying Miranda.



In Rome, Miranda notices that Adam is short of breath, and eventually, she learns that he has a stent in his heart. Slowly, she is able to let go of her anger: “Soon, who knows when, soon we will no longer be in this life.” She feels pity for “this man, this fellow creature, who has, like her, lost youth, and, unlike her, health.”

Finally, Adam is moved to express his “regret for the life we didn’t have together.” Miranda is briefly tempted to reunite with him, to tear down her life (and his) to try to recapture lost youth. However, both realize the folly of this, and they part for good, to return to their families.