Dale M Kushner – författare

Dale Kushner's novel The Conditions of Love traces the journey of a girl from childhood to adulthood as she reckons with her parents' abandonment, her need to break from society's limitations, and her overwhelming desire for spiritual and erotic love. At an early age Eunice encounters the difficult truths of loss and disappointment, and through an innate sense of her own worth, she perseveres. While working in a small-town grocery store, Eunice meets Fox, a sheep farmer and artist twice her age. She enters into not only an erotic relationship with him but a soulful love that eventually has to withstand the trials of a brutal accident. Within her unconventional life with Fox, Eunice finds herself as an artist and as a young woman undaunted in bringing her art to the larger world. This engaging examination of a mother and daughter's relationship will appeal to the same audience that embraced Mona Simpson's acclaimed classic Anywhere But Here and Elizabeth Strout's bestselling Amy and Isabelle.

Set in the Midwest in the last years of the fifties, The Conditions of Love traces the life of young Eunice from her turbulent childhood to the present in three parts. We first meet ten-year-old Eunice as a lonely, sensitive, imaginative girl living with her maliciously funny and self-absorbed mother Mern. (A manicureeste. Think Lucille Ball with a narcissistic character disorder.) Searching for a steadfast love, Eunice dreams of reconnecting with her long-lost 'Hollywood handsome' father, but she is crushed when, on the brink of marriage, her mother abruptly kicks out the unfailingly helpful but unglamorous Sam. Mother and daughter resettle in the resort town of Turtle Lake where Mern imagines she will now find the captivating man of her dreams. In the third part of the novel, fate intervenes in Eunice's life in the person of the alluring Fox, a man twice her age. On Fox's farm, Eunice drops the husks of childhood and explores her own desires, seeking to understand: how do we survive love? How do we understand our fate? How do we transform and transcend the past?