IN STORES NOW!
A MEMOIR OF ENDURING LOVE AND SEARING LOSS
THIS FAMILIAR HEART is an intimate rendering of the turbulent courtship and deep personal connection between beloved Houston columnist Leon Hale and his third wife, Babette Fraser Hale.
They were the unlikeliest of couples. He was sixty, a “country boy” who wrote about ordinary people with humor and sensitivity. She was thirty-six, a city girl and one-time socialite struggling in her career while raising a young son. No one thought it could possibly work, but it did—through a long partnership and longer marriage.
After he died in 2021 during the pandemic isolation, searing levels of grief and doubt threatened Babette’s understanding of the relationship that had sustained her for so long.
In candid, evocative prose, she explores, first, the complex joys of unexpected love, succeeded by the distorted perceptions that can accompany the death of a cherished spouse. Only a painful journey toward loving resolution allows life to go on.
Babette Fraser Hale is the author of A WALL OF BRIGHT DEAD FEATHERS, 2022 winner of the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters (order here). Her stories have received notice from Best American Short Stories, 2015 and the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review. In addition to writing fiction, she has been a magazine feature writer, columnist, contributing editor, book editor and publisher. She lives in Texas.