LOVE IN GOOD TIME: A Memoir

Raised in sleepy northern England by a schoolteacher father and a mother frequently hospitalized with rheumatoid arthritis and bleeding ulcers, Robson strained against the confines of her tiny village and her gender, playing cowboys and Indians with the local girls and fighting with her older brother. Once off to the University of York in the pivotal mid-1960s, she found Marxism, drugs and a panoply of sex. A brief early marriage ended when she acknowledged her lesbian identity and took off for London by motorbike to live in a squat with radical lesbian separatists. A few years of harsh politics and unforgiving hangovers led her back to the Midlands with her osteopath lover to become deputy headmistress of a rigid secondary school of the sort only England can produce. There she lived deeply closeted until her life began to unravel in the mid-70s. Beginning in 1960 and ending in 1986, Robson's tale will be familiar to women hovering near 50. A born raconteur, Robson makes the prosaic immensely engaging. With a flair for just the right turn of phrase to invoke an era or a moment, she deftly combines the wry wit of hindsight with the poignancy of recollection. Her memoir evokes the coming-of-age many feminists of Robson's era experienced. (The book's only missteps are faux letters to and from a grandmother who never appears in the memoir as prologue and epilogue.) Intuitive, charming and rife with the conflict of past and present, this memoir's tales will resonate with many women. (Sept.)

Forecast:Robson's book should sell well among feminist and lesbian baby boomers, and women's studies and queer studies classes, aided by blurbs from Edmund White and Hanne Blank.