Starting Over

Dan Wakefield’s humorous national bestseller “Starting Over,” absorbs the themes of love and loss between the sexual revolution of the 1970s. After a few trying years, Phil Potter chooses to divorce Jessica, thinking he’s going to go on a wild adventure through the sexually liberated 1970s. But rather than wild orgies, his new start leaving behind his PR job for a teaching position at a junior college turns out to be more solitary drinking and TV dinners. His connections with women are not immune to dissatisfaction stemming from their own failed marriages or divorces.

Phil starts to come to terms with the harsh although frequently darkly humorous realities of starting afresh and looking for love again. The novel depicts the joys and problems of dating in the 1970s with humor and a profound grasp of how relationships work or, more often, don’t work capturing both the excitement and struggles of feminism and the sexual revolution.