Old Love Author:Margaret Erhart Old Love Is The Portrait of an American family, the Haases -- the parents, Frank and Tommie; the children, Brighton and Helen -- and of Hal, gay, Tommie's close friend since their college days, later a neighbor in a New Jersey suburb, and often a stand-in parent to the Haas children. — Told through shifting narrators the novel unfold... more »s over a decade as the Haas children come of age at the end of the turbulent 60s and move out into the world and their separate lives. It is a family "joined by blood and trouble", wrote the poet Mark Doty, but "also bound by old, hard-won affections which time and difficulty deepen, finally, into the most complicated kind of love.".It is also a novel about sexual exploration, about people with human weaknesses defining themselves against the world and each other.« less