MIMSY CUM LAUDE

With this debut memoir, Blossom attempts to excavate the secrets his long-lost love took to her grave.

In 2020, in the middle of heart surgery, Blossom found himself floating toward a light at the end of a tunnel. During this near-death experience, he saw the apparition of his college sweetheart, a woman who had died decades before. The encounter was life-changing. “I am no Emerson,” admits the author early in the book. “I hate writing essays. I never could write poetry. But now, her memory sanctions the words to flow as a brook from my mind. Her presence bade me to tell her narrative. Our story of true love.” With this memoir, Blossom meditates on the one that got away: Marilyn “Mimsy” Cosic. Blossom met Mimsy during his freshman year in college, paying for her coffee one morning in the student union. Blossom felt a strong attraction to her immediately, but it took the reticent Mimsy a month of platonic flirtation before she was willing to give her heart to him. After a whirlwind romance that lasted the rest of the school year, they parted ways with the intention of visiting each other that summer, but they never did. In fact, Blossom never saw Mimsy again, at least not in the waking world. It wasn’t until years later, after his vision of Mimsy during his near-death experience, that Blossom decided to try to piece together the woman’s life and find the answers to questions that had haunted him for years. What was the great hurt—“more than you will ever know or can ever imagine”—that Mimsy referenced early in their courtship? And what of her brief marriage that ended in a terrible house fire that left Mimsy severely burned? And why did Mimsy’s surviving sister refuse to answer any questions about Mimsy’s past? Blossom’s quest for closure became an obsessive investigation into alcoholism, sexual assault, and even murder.

Blossom may not be an Emerson (as the strained pun in the book’s title attests). Even so, his earnest prose is mostly charming, as here where he describes his immediate attraction to Mimsy: “Intensity is the spark that ignites the relationship, the extraordinary strength of attraction, sometimes the ‘love at first sight’ phenomenon. (Ellen Barkin explained this to Al Pacino in the movie Sea of Love.) I experienced that with Mimsy when I first met her: physical attraction, mental and emotional compatibility, and a fervent desire to be with her.” His examination of Marilyn’s tragic life is not quite insightful enough to make for engaging reading. The mysteries, such as they are, do not interest the reader as much as they do the author. The most intriguing aspect of the story—Blossom’s consuming obsession with a woman he dated briefly half a century before—is left mostly unexamined despite the fact that he remains married to his wife, Judith, for the entirety of his investigation. While Blossom does find a bit of closure in the form of a remarkably misplaced note, the journey is likely a bit too ordinary to find a wide readership.

An imperfect account of a man’s investigation into the life of an old flame.