cover image Burning Bridges

Burning Bridges

Inette Miller. Putnam Publishing Group, $16.95 (237pp) ISBN 978-0-399-13320-6

In a sometimes tediously detailed diary of a love affair that ruined her marriage of 16 years, Miller, a North Carolina journalist, writes that although she loved her husband, she was irresistibly driven to experience once more a consuming passion, perhaps to deny the mid-life biological imperative. Her partner's love, she contends, offered a means of self-exploration; he too was married. Revelation of the affair caused the expected havoc, pain, guilt and remorse on both sides, along with occasional violence, disruption of their children's lives and ostracism by family and friends. These relationships were temporarily replaced by brief, intense friendships formed in a mental hospital from which the author emerged determined to rebuild her self-esteem and create a new, independent life in a new locality. First serial to New Woman; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates. (October 5)