|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
[John] Donatich is the director of Yale University Press and his wife is the literary agent and writer Betsy Lerner. They are very different types. Donatich, external and gregarious, was raised in New Jersey by immigrant Croatian parents, while Lerner, the child of a Jewish middle-class family, always had an internal personality. They fell in love when he, following up on a friendship they had formed at a poetry workshop, visited her at a psychiatric hospital she had checked herself into; she has a history of manic-depression, recounted in her book, "Food and Loathing." (Lerner is always called "B" in "Ambivalence," as if the book were a case study.) Donatich's attraction to Lerner is the love a boy good at technical things finds in an almost insolvable puzzle, while her love for him is the love broken pieces of a vase feel for the glue.
- D. T. MAX, "'Ambivalence, A Love Story': The Good Husband," new york times january 23, 2005
posted January 23, 2005 in print. 2002