If the playful title of Stephen Akey’s memoir of love and marriage, RACCOON LOVE, gives the impression of a heartwarming, happily-ever-after ode to domestic bliss, Akey bluntly dismisses that notion with his opening sentence: “It all ends badly.” Akey, the author of two previous memoirs, College and Library, and a collection of essays, Culture Fever, chronicles the 23-year history of his relationship with artist Lucy Ha Kung from their first meeting, by the sundial on the Columbia University campus, through the slow disintegration of their marriage. As painful as their story’s ending may have been, however, Akey remains a firm believer in true love: “That the love dies, that the infatuated boy and girl turn into harried middle-aged parents, mitigates nothing of the reality of that love.”
The foreknowledge of Stephen and Lucy’s unhappy fate looms heavily over RACCOON LOVE, casting a shadow over its cheeriest moments, as when the pair discover each other in the 1980s via a Village Voice personal ad. (“Shy handsome WN, 24, into lit and film, sks very attractive F, 20’s w/similar interests. Must believe in love.”) Lucy, a talented painter and quiltmaker, captivates the “pathologically shy” Brooklyn librarian with her keen intelligence and quirky personality and is in turn charmed by the earnest intensity of Stephen’s ardor. Love blooms between the duo, and they soon begin their married life as an “artsy-fartsy, duly therapized, politically progressive New York couple.” Akey fondly recalls these happy early days, filled with such mundane but joyous shared experiences as birdwatching and discussing art films over dinners in Greenwich Village. Their romance is not the stuff of literature—”We weren’t Tristan and Isolde or any other archetype of all-consuming passion”—but something more modest and cozy. “We were like a pair of raccoons in their den,” Akey writes, “creaturely, warm, furry, and clinging to each other for love and security.”
As the two settle into comfortable familiarity, Akey’s memories become a montage of life’s ups and downs: the birth of a son, a brush with serious illness, and a string of career successes and setbacks. As the arc of their marriage begins its inevitable decline, Akey, with palpable resignation, begins his forensic analysis of their relationship’s demise. Their dissolution is as prosaic as their union: instead of theatrical fireworks or a catastrophic betrayal, there is merely a slow, incremental uncoupling as love fades into indifference. “Little by little, without even realizing it, we got disconnected, Akey writes. Struggling in vain to rekindle their intimacy, he can only watch with helpless dismay as the pair, “numbed by all the commuting and the cooking and the cleaning,” drift beyond any hope of salvation.
An engaging storyteller, Stephen Akey brings sardonic, self-effacing wit and disarming honesty—without vanity or rancor—to this beautifully rendered, compulsively readable elegy for lost love. Despite its mournful tone, RACCOON LOVE studiously avoids melodrama or maudlin self-pity even in its darkest moments, the author reflecting upon his experiences with grace, humility, and unwavering idealism. “I firmly believe that being in love with another person and having that love reciprocated, however badly it may end, however briefly it may last, is the biggest, greatest, grandest thing that will ever happen to any of us,” Akey concludes. “We loved. It was real. It was true.”
~Edward Sung for IndieReader