The Not-quite-frozen Lake Of Tender Hurt: a flawed memoir pretending to be a novel, part 3 of the trilogy SLEEPING WITH BOYS

'All the boys I have fallen for over the last half century always had a secret story behind them, a hurt that never healed, a pain that was still there, deep down, inside,' the author writes, 'so I have always tried to move carefully, gingerly onto the not-quite-frozen lake of tender hurt. Otherwise -I knew- the thin ice would crack and I would fail miserably and just end up with wet feet.' 'The Not-quite-frozen Lake Of Tender Hurt', a novel that somewhere in its sweeping description of a 45-year search for love, strangely or perhaps not that strangely, turns into a slightly rambling autobiography of the author, a somewhat haphazard life-story he keeps trying to treat as a novel. But somewhere in there is the reckoning of past mistakes and a lot of unraveling love affairs that were meant to last forever. The slow realization, that -in the end- everyone has his own baggage, turns the writer around to the rather shocking thought that he is probably writing the case-history of his inability to sustain his own concept of love. Even in the last chapters, he is still trying to convince himself of the possibility of falling in love one more time. And of course he does, because the boy he finally meets certainly does not have HIS baggage. This 'flawed memoir pretending to be a novel' is the ultimate part of the trilogy SLEEPING WITH BOYS, a title that did not arrive as an Einstein-like mind-flash but seemed to cover the subject quite well. These three books are not sad stories, but are based on a life spent in all the right places, London on the tail-end of the Sixties, the Spanish island of Ibiza, still not discovered by mass tourism, the South of France, before the fish-and-chip shops opened there, Rome, Venice and Florence before you had to buy a ticket to get in. And a lot of lovers, now gone or spread out to far corners of the earth. 'I now realize I was subconsciously always looking for the one-and-only, and in the end I found him.'