THE FIRST TWO

Szabo recalls two foundational relationships in this personal memoir.

From a young age, the author was truly her father’s daughter. “My father claimed me right away,” she writes. “I was his. My little sister was my mother’s.” A Hungarian gentleman with Old-World charm, Szabo’s father instructed her on how to present herself to the world, from eating soup properly to correctly hanging her jacket in the theater. He warned her not to become a “bubblegum person”—a classless, mindless consumer of junk—as he felt most Americans do. Such a father proved impossible to please, and, as Szabo grew older, his demands placed an increasing strain on their relationship. After high school, while taking a writing class in New York, Szabo met a wealthy young man who soon loomed nearly as large as her father in her life. This boyfriend knew the city, the latest records, and how to be effortlessly cool, and he introduced Szabo to a whole new way of existing in the world. She soon moved with him to Los Angeles, where he would pursue a career in film. In short vignettes, Szabo traces her relationships with both of these men, the “first two” who helped to shape her relationships with all others. Szabo’s prose is stark and effortless. She paints in quiet images that nevertheless seem to vibrate with emotional intensity, as when she laments her fights with her boyfriend: “If I take him out of my life there is not much left. I don’t know why that is. He stays busy whether I am there or not. He still makes Rice Krispy chicken for dinner, he still lights up a joint, he still goes out for ice cream.” Though no strong narrative thread weaves the vignettes together, a theme emerges about the ways in which parents and lovers exert a profound gravitational pull on us, particularly in our formative years. Fans of literary memoirs will enjoy this fragmentary examination of two nearly universal relationships: the larger-than-life parent and the first significant love.

An intimate dual portrait that brings the author’s life into vibrant focus.