Loving Violet: A Novel

Loving Violet is a tight cinematic narrative about conflicting dimensions of love, romantic as well as familial, told against a backdrop of the pleasures and frustrations of the writing life. A generational sequel to Lewis’s Take This, the book follows the late Robert Tevis’s grandson Aaron through his entry into a graduate MFA writing program and the arms of the most drop-jaw gorgeous-and disarmingly untethered-girl he has ever known. From there we follow Aaron and Violet as they travel through the intoxicating, absurd, and confounding stages of erotic love, from a fictional Westchester college to a small loft in Brooklyn, the North Fork of Long Island, and, finally, with their newborn Esme, to Central America. In Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica, Aaron and Esme establish an unusual extended family life with a unique group of women (his divorced mother, widowed grandmother, his late grandfather’s lover, and the grandfather’s former hippie caretaker) while Violet travels the globe as a successful writer.