The Unfallen

“The poetry off the page…” “You wanted the poetry, right? Where did you want it? On a page? Where it’s safe and lifeless and undemanding? Little black marks on a printed page, the brilliant disguise of an unbounded emptiness… This is poetry. This is drama. This is life. Right here, right now. You were so lucky, weren’t you? You had men who wanted you but didn’t really love you, wouldn’t let themselves, wouldn’t risk it, wouldn’t try. So you could dismiss them and repel them with your scorn. You gave them a reason to thank themselves for not taking the chance and you gave yourself the proof, over and over again, that no one ever would. You could write about them to an avid readership of women who were all doing the same damn thing, one way or another. All the little Cathys freezing on the moors, always perfectly safe from finding out what they are prepared to risk. Well here is your problem, Gwendolyn Penelope Jones. Here is your grand dilemma. Now there’s no more dreaming, is there? Now there’s no more pining. This is the poetry off the page, baby, and now you have to do something about it. Welcome to my life… Welcome me to yours…” —– Understanding The Unfallen: Why not love? Real love? Not Cathy on the moors, not Scarlet on the stairs, not Bogart and Bacall – or Lucy and Ricky. Why not a love story about real people finding a way to forge a real and enduring love together? That’s The Unfallen. It’s about adults – Gwen is 35, Devin is 38. It’s about second chances – and knowing what went wrong the first time. It’s about the politics of sex and sexual politics. It’s about love as worship with love-making as its holiest sacrament. It’s about a man who yearns to commit and a woman who jealously hoards her sovereignty. It’s about learning to give, learning to share, learning to trust – learning to love. The Unfallen is a very sexy book about philosophy and a very philosophical book about love and longing. It’s written about and for smart, productive people who live to love their lives… Understanding Gwen: Gwendolyn Jones is a beautiful woman who is angry about being treated as a beauty object and who covers her anger with a stinging wit. An American who has spent most of her life in England, she grew up in achingly solitary circumstances; she not only expects to fall back on her own resources, she is sure that people will betray her at the worst possible moment. She is very playful sexually and she has learned that she can control men by giving them a kind of forwardness they had never dared to wish for. Gwen is the single-mother of a 17-year-old boy. She works as a woman’s page columnist for The Boston Globe. Understanding Devin: Devin Dwyer is the son of a Boston immigrant family who very proudly upholds his family’s traditions. An M.I.T. astrophysicist, he is the polar opposite of the aloof, insectile scientist. He sheds the warmth of family everywhere and he builds webs of interdependence to all those who surround him. Because of who he is and because of the lessons he learned from his parents and grandparents, Devin is a fanatic about integrity. As the result of an ugly divorce, he has become a fanatic about the truth. He has custody of his five-year-old son and they live together in a brick townhome in the inner city of Boston.