Matters of Vital Interest
A Forty-Year Friendship with Leonard Cohen
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Descripción editorial
A memoir of the author's decades-long friendship and spiritual journey with the late singer, songwriter, novelist, and poet Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen passed away in late 2016, leaving behind many who cared for and admired him, but perhaps few knew him better than longtime friend Eric Lerner. Lerner, a screenwriter and novelist, first met Cohen at a Zen retreat forty years earlier. Their friendship helped guide each other through life's myriad obstacles, a journey told from a new perspective for the first time.
Funny, revealing, self-aware, and deeply moving, Matters of Vital Interest is an insightful memoir about Lerner's relationship with his friend, whose idiosyncratic style and dignified life was deeply informed by his spiritual practices. Lerner invites readers to step into the room with them and listen in on a lifetime's ongoing dialogue, considerations of matters of vital interest, spiritual, mundane, and profane. In telling their story, Lerner depicts Leonard Cohen as a captivating persona, the likes of which we may never see again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this affectionate memoir, novelist and screenwriter Lerner (Pinkerton's Secret) chronicles his friendship with the late singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen. The two first met in 1977, when they were in their 40s, at a Zen retreat in California. For several years they shared a house in California, where they supported each other through divorces and fatherhood (both men favored their daughters over their sons), and through various illnesses and surgeries. Lerner tells of Cohen's love of performing and the struggles he had with the Sony record company, which refused to publicize his 1988 album, I'm Your Man. As both men aged, they continued to be inspirational forces in each other's lives, affectionately referring to each other as "Old Boy." Lerner's descriptions of Cohen's last days are moving: in a final email exchange between them, Cohen writes, "I wrote back quickly, desperately, several times, but there was no reply. Our long conversation had finally come to and end." Lerner's tender, moving memoir reveals Cohen as a devoted friend and father, a side of him not often seen in public.
