Two-Way Traffic

First-ever paperback edition of Joel Lieber's posthumously-published 1972 semi-autobiographical novel . Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and presented as a series of journal extracts, it is the harrowing portrayal of a young, successful writer's efforts to reassemble a life shattered by marital problems, a bitter custody battle, depression, anxiety, and a suicide attempt. The novel is a barely fictionalized account of the author's last two years and is a frank, often heartbreaking work, but not without brilliant flashes of humor, genuine warmth, and optimism. Jessie Jacobi had built a successful life as a writer: well-received books, attractive wife, two children. Then it all began to crumble. His marriage collapsed. His writing lost its unity and direction. A decision, any decision, became all but impossible. "In the second year of my third decade, someone else has come to live inside me, and I hate that visitor," he writes in one of the journals that make up this novel. Beginning with Jesse's collapse, the journals record his often indecisive struggle with that unwelcome visitor-through a suicide attempt and the subsequent search for new friends, new beliefs, and a new understanding of himself. Joel Lieber has written a frank and penetrating novel, an intensely personal chronicle of one man's journey into the depths of his own mind.