I may have gotten myself into something more than I can handle when I told a woman — a passing acquaintance who has treated me with kindness — that I would write a piece on the novel she had written.  It was a warm night, we were sitting at a bar, all around us people were making merry, the kind of night that can trap you into making promises that look insurmountably hard to keep the next morning.

“What does a 65-year-old man who has never raised a daughter know about a coming-of-age story of an 18-year old girl?” I found myself asking as I stared vacantly out the window and wondered if I should cut down on the cups of coffee I was drinking in a day.

That was a few months ago when, in all honesty to the writer, Lonna Thiem, a piece about her book should have appeared when people were still whiling away the afternoon on summer porches or spending long, lugubrious, salacious evenings wondering if romance was waiting around the corner for them the next day.  The novel, Finding Laura, is a story about infatuation, or first love, or whatever it is that passes for romance among the young at heart.

A young woman, an aspiring scholar, falls head over heels for a college professor — an English professor, no less — for whom she used to babysit while he and his family were spending summers on the coast along Massachusetts’ fabled Martha’s Vineyard.  The story shifts from the coast to the college where Laura goes to study and where the professor teaches.  In a love affair where the pursued become the pursuer, I found myself struck by an odd truth as old and familiar as the coupling of initials carved in a tree.  To read Ms. Thiem is to know that girls will act on their feelings in ways that go far beyond boys sidling up to a beech tree with a jackknife to scratch out initials, linking theirs to their paramour’s.

More than boys, and most men it would seem, the fairer sex has the courage of their desire.  In what is commonly passed off as the “female intuition,” a young girl like Laura acts on her feelings and takes a chance much more readily than expected by the people around her, including the man she desires.

As a coming-of-age novel, Finding Laura is a period piece set in the late fifties, and only a few years earlier than my own coming of age — a phase that inexplicably still keeps showing up in my life.  As far as emotions or feelings go, the only one I remember most vividly from my adolescence was uncertainty.  Perhaps it has something to do with my cultural upbringing as a male in twentieth-century America — a time when boys were taught to hold their feelings in check and get on with the important things in life such as getting an education or a good job.  No one in my crowd thought or acknowledged that acting on desire was an act of courage.

At the time I went to college, I had a steady girlfriend who summered on Island Pond and lived many miles away in New Hampshire.  We struck up a rapport one year when we went to the Barton fair together — a double date in which each of us was with someone else.  Summer’s end did not close the curtain on our romance — she wrote me letters with SWK on the envelope about the gum line — sealed with a kiss.  My parents wanted to know what was going on.

In love, the following summer was the highpoint of my life.  We were inseparable; a state no doubt solidified and reinforced by the fact that her parents had a speedboat and, more importantly, liked me.  I was on track for what was expected of a young man who had ambition, grades and his parents’ financial support.  The fact that we were headed for different colleges didn’t deter us.  Rather, we took it in stride, and when I drove up to see her for the first time at the University of New Hampshire in her family’s brand new, red Mustang convertible, I felt as if I were sitting as the song says, “on top of the world.”

No one, I have since learned, sits on top of the world for very long.  Of the two of us, I think it was me who lacked the courage of desire.  To act solely on an affair of the heart in my post adolescent view would have been a failing of purpose.  Instead of marrying her, I took my junior year abroad in Europe and was never able to rekindle the romance I had so confidently left behind.

In the novel, Laura also takes her junior year abroad in Europe.  Her professor catches up with her in England, and they renew their romance.  It doesn’t go much further.  Like glowing embers, their passion is spent; though she appears to be the only one who realizes it.  Perhaps that is Ms. Thiem’s point.  To act courageously on desire is no less a feat than to act courageously on a principle.  The only difference may be that, as a culture, we have chosen to overlook the moral ambiguity that arises when we fail to acknowledge what lies in the heart.

Other cultures have wrestled with desire a little more openly.  There is no ambiguity in the mind of a character I came across nearly a year ago in a Costa Rican short story, “The Adventure,” by Samuel Rovinski.  It’s a story about a man who cannot bring himself to act on his desire to leave his marriage and take up with his wife’s sister, who is conveniently staying at their home in a room down the hall.  To be sure, it’s hardly the ideal boy-meets-girl situation.  But then again, it’s a story of how we become the authors of our own miseries.  The character tries to get his courage up by indulging in all sorts of fantasies, until it’s the woman herself he blames for not taking the first step, for not seeing him as the lover he could be, and coming to his bed and absolving him of his cowardice.  By the end he has become a man trapped inside himself.

Home from her overseas studies, Laura’s future looks more appealing.  The boy she fell for in England arrives in the States to do graduate work at a nearby college in Boston.  She eagerly takes up with him, free of regrets she might have harbored had she failed to have the courage to act on desire.

Ms. Thiem is a summer resident of West Glover.  Her novel can be ordered online through Amazon or Barnes & Noble.