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I put this on my reading list after we watched the film – the haunting nature of the film is here to. The structure of the novel and film differ but the essence of the storytelling has the same quality.
A summer of love, on the eve of ‘adulthood’, the nerd and the farm boy, love across a social divide all the sweeter for it.
An then separation – lives lived away, but shaped with a longing, when in middle age the nerd now a successful but not entirely happy writer returns, and encounters his lover’s Son.
But this is not the beginning of a happy ending – his lover seems to have lived a life trapped by responsibilities and unable to acknowledge his sexuality, until things unwind into his suicide.
This is such a sad story, and yet it is written as a gem.
To come of age as a gay man in a small town in the early eighties was tough, there has been progress, but some days it is hard to be hopeful.
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