Book Recommendation

    Nigel Nicolson's unflinching examination of his parents' marriage is probably sui generis. It's hard for me to imagine another son writing with as much candor, maturity and objectivity about the most intimate details of the lives of his parents, especially when the amours of those parents were so complicated. You see, Nigel's parents were Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. It would be a slight to call theirs a "marriage of convenience," but it was certainly an unorthodox marriage. If you want to see how an open marriage between bisexual partners could be negotiated in the last century, then here is your case study. And yet there was a little something more here, a different sort of love. There was an abiding between these two spirits even as they traveled so far from one another. They were rather like John Donne's compass. If you want to see very deeply into the Bloomsbury Group and its convoluted psychology, this is your book. Romantic life among the Bloomsburians almost invariably conformed to the old Facebook bromide: "It's complicated."  There's ample first person narration in the form of correspondence and other more diaristic documentation throughout this book. Portrait of a Marriage was first published in 1973, but the edition I have was brought out by Atheneum in 1980.