Objects of Desire: A Portrait of Love and Marriage
About the Author\ Ralph Graves is the author of six novels and four nonfiction books. A distinguished jounalist, he started at Life magazine as a young researcher just out of college and rose through the ranks to become the last editor of the weekly Life. He later became the editorial director for all Time Inc. magazines. His wife, Eleanor Graves, also started her career as a Life researcher and became a writer and senior editor. When Life resumed publication as a monthly, she was named...
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This is a love story, told in a completely different way. Eleanor MacKenzie, just graduated from Barnard, and Ralph Graves, just graduated from Harvard, met as brand-new researchers at Life magazine in September 1948. They soon married other people, but the two couples then became closest friends. After seven years of that closeness, Eleanor and Ralph realized that they were profoundly in love. Both went through bitter and punitive divorces to get to each other. It was worth it. They have now been married for 45 years. This book is the story of their love and marriage, told through the myriad objects that have played a significant role in that story. Gifts, homes, cars, painting, books, furniture, jewelry, clothes all are invested with a deeply emotional value that grew out of what those objects of desire meant to these two people. But the story does not apply only to these two particular people. As Ralph Graves says about these objects of desire, They have resonance. Each of us, in every love story, in every marriage, can name special objects that carry that resonance. The objects are different for each of us, but the resonance is the same. The book is an intimate picture of resonance in love and marriage.
