Travels With My Lovers
By Erica Miner 

      Dr. Laura Schlessinger would blisteringly attack the operatic violinist heroine of Erica Miner's autobiographical novel Travels With My Lovers, a kind of erotic and romantic Gulliver's Travels. Her opera conductor husband is a closet gay, and while traveling in Italy with her two young children Julian and Regina, she visits Florence, a.k.a Fiorenza or Firenze, and has a liberating affair with a young Florentine Romeo named Carlo. Every summer she leaves the children with their father for three weeks and has exotic voyages into the territory of amore and amour in France, Italy, and Switzerland, for a start. This reader thinks: Judge not, lest ye be judged.

     The heroine's marriage suffers a blow because of the husband's closet homosexuality-a subtle comment on our society's invasive tendency to control people's private loves. The novel has an open, honest artistic sensibility. Troubled by the effect her affair with Carlo may have on the children, the heroine muses that she has a duty to look inside herself as an artist:

      "Of course, being a mother was, in its own way, an unsung feat of art. And if my kids were going to be happy or at least understand what happiness was possible, then the artist in me also had to be fulfilled. There was no alternative."

      Erica Miner's heroine strives to be a good mother, and this is reflected in the tolerant attitudes of the children during the heroine's five life stages: young married mother, new divorcée, mature mother, single mother yearning for a commitment, and free-spirited mother of a teenage daughter. Regina encourages her mother's romance with the cold two-timing Swiss Stephan, and aboard a cruise in the Bahamas, says she will ask the handsome Italian Gianni out on her mother's behalf. Perhaps because of their European travels, the children, or at least Regina (Julian is suspicious of Carlo), adopt a distinctly European, and very modern, view of relationships.

     The novel is an exercise in freedom and unexplored frontiers, immersing us in foreign lands and languages, reminding us, post-9/11, that life without discovery and emotional complexity is no life at all.