Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

The comic national bestseller of love and loss set amid the sexual revolution of the 1970s

When Phil Potter decides to divorce his wife, Jessica, after a few difficult years, he imagines he's in for a wild jaunt through the sexually liberated 1970s. But his new start--Phil has also left behind his job in PR for a teaching gig at a junior college--is more solitary drinking and TV dinners than raucous orgies. Even the women he does manage to connect with are equally disaffected with their own divorces or failing marriages, and Phil begins to understand the harsh, though often darkly funny, realities of starting over and searching for love the second time around.

Capturing both the excitement and struggles of feminism and the sexual revolution, Starting Over depicts the pleasures and pitfalls of dating in the seventies with humor and a deep understanding of how relationships work--or, more commonly, don't work. Replete with spot-on cultural references and rendered under Wakefield's careful journalistic eye, Starting Over is a stunning reminder of the hardships of love in the modern age.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Lawrence Block · Rating 5 out of 5]

I re-read this book in anticipation of a meeting with the author, a Facebook friend with whom I have friends and acquaintances in common. I read it the first time when it came out in paperback in 1974, loved it then, read it again sometime in the 80s, and found it held up just fine. I never saw the Burt Reynolds film, and am just as glad. The book's terrific.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book; turned into a so bad it's good movie with Burt Reynolds.

[Bob Box · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read in 1978. Man thinks his life will change for the better after his divorce then reality sets in. Later came the Paramount movie.

[The Celtic Rebel (Richard) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book after the movie got a lot of hype around Oscar time. I had not seen the movie but the way it was described it sounded like something I would enjoy reading. I absolutely loved the book. It was a few years later when I got to see the movie for the first time.

I was so shocked. The movie and the book are so different. I loved the book but only liked the movie basically for the performances. While the movie was a nice a romantic comedy, the book was funnier in the way it portrayed the trials and tribulations of a newly divorced man in his 30's trying to start all over the sexual revolution of the 1970s. The situations he found himself in at times were so hilarious and definitely a social commentary of the time by Dan Wakefield.

The book is excellent, and my favorite of all the books I have read by Dan Wakefield.