ROXIE & FRED a novel
by Richard Alther
Paperback / $19.95 / isbn: 978-1-58790-382-3 / 318 pages / 5.4 x 98.5
e-book / $7.95 / isbn: 978-1-58790-383-0
Fiction
ABOUT THE BOOK
Having spent her life helping underprivileged women, Roxie, 88, is now content in her woodsy retreat her with her garden, yoga, and art.
With his children launched, Fred, 48, has left his wife and uninspiring job to paint fulltime, shackled only with his demons of doubt.
And then one day in a life drawing class, they meet by chance.
Age doesn’t matter. Theirs is a love story that shatters orthodoxy as they discover themselves anew.
As a young woman, Roxie decided to leave her stifling marriage and a 12-year-old daughter to aid Tibetan refugees in Nepal. She then volunteered in Africa to help women and orphans, becoming linked with a rebel fighter and bearing his son. Forced to return to the U.S. and without her 2-year-old, she took up her life as an independent woman—a pariah to the families of her upper-class Boston background. For years she ran Head Start programs, aided battered women and pregnant teens, secured jobs for single mothers from the ghetto. Now, with all that behind her, she finds comfort reminiscing about her one unforgettable love affair. And she’s fulfilled by practicing yoga, growing her own food, hiking in the nearby mountains, meditating, reading, and indulging her passion for drawing.
His daughter and son both launched, and having recently left his lackluster marriage, suburban home and career, Fred feels stuck in a midlife rut. Despite an abyss of uncertainty about his inherent talent and depth of conviction for becoming a serious painter, he forges ahead without the support of a woman for the first time in his life. And then, out of the blue, he meets vibrant and beautiful Roxie, blissfully unaware of how very much older she is than meets the eye.
It begins as friendship—weekly get-togethers, alternating between his place and hers, to sketch, paint, discuss art and grapple with the illusive, often confounding creative quest. Eventually they’re sharing meals, walks in the woods, frolicking in her pond. Their growing affection for each other naturally glides into sexual play and lovemaking, astonishing and delighting them both.
Their love is put to the ultimate test when Fred’s steady hand is the only way Roxie can face the most difficult challenge of her life.
As the human race leads longer and healthier lives than ever before, Roxie and Fred’s love story serves as testament to fully embracing the mind, body and spirit, sexual pleasure included, without succumbing to the fears of older age.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Alther’s prior novels are The Decade of Blind Dates, Siegfried Follies, and The Scar Letters. A long-exhibiting painter of abstract oils, he and his spouse live in Vermont and Palm Springs, California