Looking back on love and loss
it means less; repetition and ubiquity sap the shock away. At the same time as three top ten songs on the Billboard chart (March 2011) had the f-word in their title, British viewers were accustomed to the surreal and hilarious lengths that Armando Ianucci went to in order for Malcolm tucker’s swearing to be both funny and full of threat.
It’s a tactic that satirists such as Chris Morris, Charlie Brooker and even Caitlin Moran
In the Thick of It. have used (her referring to David Cameron as a “gammon robot” has all the queasy undertones of a “new” swear).
Mohr identifies that nowadays, racial slurs (as well as attacks on people because of sexual orientation) are deemed far more offensive than even the words this newspaper would only print in an asterisked form. In a very small way that seems like we’re growing up. READERs of these pages may recall the reviews of writer and painter Marlena Frick. In this moving memoir, she tells of her three great loves, and their tragic ends.
Married in her twenties to a doctor some 20 years older, who had fought his way with the Polish army through Europe, Frick at last found domestic peace after a childhood in a disrupted household. He died after only seven years of marriage. It took two years for her to accept he was not coming back.
On holiday in Portugal, she met her next love – a scotsman and a distinguished writer. she moved to Edinburgh to be with him even though he refused to leave his wife. they were lovers for 20 years, and thOse LOved aNd LOviNG FaCes By Marlena Frick Vanguard Press, 118pp, £6.99
review by Frick writes powerfully of being his mistress. then – “One day I saw him on the street – a shaky, thinhaired old man. How come I had only just noticed ?” two years later he was dead.
the third great love in Frick’s life was a newspaper colleague, Jim Ritchie, with whom she had “five jokey years” before both realised they were in love. He left his wife and for ten years they lived happily in retirement, writing, painting, travelling. In Ritchie, she says, she had found her soulmate.
But on a painting trip to spain, he collapsed and died in hospital. Frick thought of suicide, even consulting a book on the best way to do it. she doesn’t spare the reader the terrible emotions of loss, and she also describes at unusual depth the passions of physical love, but above all this is a memoir of a woman who searched for enduring love and lost.