Before the Rain

May 14, 2012
A friendship between two journalists covering the Philippines Revolution of 1986 deepens into a passionate, far-flung love affair in this serenely capable work by Lopez Torregrosa (The Noise of Infinite Longing). The two women were first colleagues at a Manhattan newspaper office: the Puerto Rico–born author was an editor at the New York Times, a refugee from a “dead relationship” in the suburbs who moved to her friend Tim’s house in a “seedy” neighborhood of the city; while Elizabeth (then known as Blake) was the newbie reporter in the office, sharp, diffident, a loner, and separating from her husband. A position for South Asia correspondent opened up, and Elizabeth took it, just as the presidential election campaign of Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino heated up. Tentatively the two writers grew closer over correspondence; the author arrived for a four-week vacation in Manila, sealing her resolve to leave her job at the newspaper, move to Manila to be with Elizabeth, and try to write a book, as Elizabeth has encouraged her. Indeed, over seven years amid tumultuous travels, journalistic assignments, and housekeeping from New York to Tokyo, their relationship charged their writerly ambition with passionate purpose, yet the long separations eventually took a lonely toll. Moreover, as Lopez Torregrosa fashions in her oblique and beautiful fashion, the two women could never really acknowledge their love publicly, underscoring a sad truth to this memorable work. Agent: Kathy Robbins.

August 1, 2012
Torregrosa's stirring memoir of the 1980s and 1990s evokes politically tumultuous places, Manila and Baghdad, and the emotionally turbulent landscape of a high-risk, passionate, and sometimes controversial intimacy. The rhythms defining that heartfelt yearning unfold as desk-bound editor Torregrosa falls in love with reserved, understated Elizabeth, a married foreign correspondent who invites her to the Philippines, not for friendship but something dreadful and brilliant. The lovers evolve as a couple amid political upheavals and personal dissimilarities: I was the very thing she wanted to avoidchaos, intensity, a fall from grace. I was writing, passion, books, long drinks in the night. It frightened her. . . . I was unlike anyone she had known, fearless, unrelenting, moving within a world I had largely created for myself, haunted by a bottomless sorrow. Conflicting assignments and relocations exacerbate the author's self-doubting bouts with black holes of failure, making this memoir as much about the struggles of creating art as the uncertainties of intimacy and passion. Torregrosa leaves us wondering: Does time heal wounds or turn them into blurred markers of our history?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)