Bobby and Carolyn

Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers focuses on the author's mother and the "glamorous soprano" who came between his parents when he was eight years old. They both fell in love with her, but Carolyn Long and his mother, whose nickname was Bobby, ended up together, sharing a life and what they secretly considered a marriage, having exchanged vows on a moonlit night in the summer of 1958. This memoir celebrates the do-it-yourself union between two women: a housewife who became a bank teller and a professional singer who became a voice teacher. It endured until one partner's death in 1991-memorialized by the cemetery plot they share, with their names engraved on opposite sides of the tombstone, just like the names of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Their life together was turbulent, partly because of their volatile personalities (and it took volatility to make such a leap of faith into forbidden love in the Fifties), partly because of prejudice against same-sex relationships, so they had to call themselves "cousins" in order to rent an apartment or a house together. Although the author grew up with the two women and considered Carolyn more of a parent than his father, he didn't discover the true nature of their tumultuous relationship until both women had died and left clues for him to find in their diaries and notes.