He/She

by Herbert Gold

An unconventional love story finds a man and a woman, amid disturbing circumstances, playing out their fears and desires, moving from a tender marriage to an amicable divorce, and finding in their separation a strange union

213 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

San Francisco literary icon Herbert Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. After several of his poems were accepted by literary magazines as a teenager, he studied philosophy at Columbia University, where he befriended writers who would define the Beat Generation, from Anaïs Nin to Allen Ginsberg. Gold won a Fulbright fellowship and moved to Paris, where he did graduate studies at the Sorbonne and worked on his first novel Birth of a Hero, published in 1951.

Gold wrote more than thirty books, including the bestsellers Fathers and The Man Who Was Not With It and received many awards, including the Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. He also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard.

Gold returned to writing poetry in the last years of his life, creating the book Father Verses Sons, A Correspondence in Poems with his sons, filmmaker Ari Gold and musician Ethan Gold, which was finalized in the weeks before his death, and is now being published by Rare Bird Lit. He also acted in a companion film, Brother Verses Brother coming in late 2024.

Reviews

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Simenon style psychological eccentric or bizarre love story. It is about the unraveling of a marriage by the wife who wanted out but wanting to remain in while punishing her poor husband who could not muster pulling away entirely. Indifference in the end, the fine chiseling away of remnants of love, the sandpapering down of soft feelings so that in the end the poor husband was able to accept her acute confusion and his new state of normal. Interesting writing style from Herbert Gold, would like to read more of his books.