Rosecrans Baldwin, You Lost Me There
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A he-said-she-said story that pits love against science
Rosecrans Baldwin’s engaging debut is defined by memory and loss. To his neighbors, Doctor Victor Aaron might appear content with day-to-day life in his late fifties: long hours in a lab researching Alzheimer’s, a daily swim off the Maine coast, wine and cigarettes with an older friend under his care — even a standing Friday afternoon rendezvous with a much younger lab assistant. Fact is, repetition and data have robbed Victor of emotion. He hasn’t thoroughly grieved the untimely death of his wife, Sara, a few years earlier. Nor has he recovered from their rocky marriage. We get to know Sara, who found late success as a screenwriter and playwright in the Nora Ephron mold, through a stack of idea-laden note cards she left behind, perhaps intended for her husband to find.
You Lost Me There is a skilled he-said-she-said story that pits love against science. “More important than children,” Victor recalls, “more important than our careers to Sara was the singularity of our relationship, never compromised. Always growing, never-ending. Its own species, one that didn’t need millennia to evolve.” Dryly, he adds: “An unreasonable, unrealistic aspiration that I learned to share.” Only when Victor’s routine is threatened and he’s forced to confront emotion, does the façade begin to crack. Baldwin, editor of the long-running online magazine, the Morning News, populates the glassy Maine coast with fragile characters. Narrators JoAnna Perrin and Johnny Heller shine as the heart and mind of a marriage.
