In My Other Life Stories Author:Joan Silber Joan Silber's In My Other Life is grounded in New York, and each of these stories focuses on the Great Divide--the surprising reversal that separates an old life from the new. From the glories of bad habits in their twenties (you never knew what you would end up doing), Silber's people move though decades of sobering conclusions and elating acc... more »idents. The heroes of these stories are bartenders, painters, ex-drug dealers, birth control counselors, video store managers, people who have been around the proverbial block. The decisive turn can be the breezy agreement to a green-card marriage that lasts for twenty years, or a young mother's phone call home that sends her toddler away. In "Lake Natasink" (first published in The New Yorker), an ex-junkie keeps taunting a friend who is about to step off the edge into a new family life in the country. In "Ragazzi," two former rock groupies, with families and jobs, try to remember "how they learned not to be idiots." In "What Lasts," newlyweds go from a lifestyle funded by dope smuggling in Turkey to a more mundane income gleaned from retailing women's underwear. As they nest in a "loft as big as a lake," the couple's happiness is threatened when a rare illness strikes. Once "too young, too vain, too something to think about the consequences," these veteran characters are witnesses to the ways "your heart gets heavier."« less