An affair with a much older voice teacher leads a young girl into early marriage, leaving behind her Brooklyn family and friends for a new life shadowed by her husband’s Old World expectations. Decades later, with her child now pursuing an art career in New York, mother and son come to terms with the quiet intimacy they’ve both resented and cultivated. With shades of Woolf and Bellow, Devotion is a story of family, solitude, and self-expression, where old and new values ripple across generations.
“Michelle Herman’s beautifully written and wise novel probes the crucial and enduring questions of how we choose our paths in life. Her naive heroine marries in haste and learns, at leisure, the many facets of love, its disappointments as well as its unexpected rewards. A pleasure to read.” – Lynne Sharon Schwartz, This Is Where We Came In and A Lynn Sharon Schwartz Reader
Michelle Herman is the author of Dog, a short novel, and Like A Song: Essays, both published by Outpost19. Longlisted for the 2014 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Stories We Tell Ourselves, she is also the author of The Middle of Everything (essays), Missing (a novel), and A Girl’s Guide to Life (a book for children). Born and raised in Brooklyn, she has lived for many years in Columbus, Ohio, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ohio State.
