All For Love

Ved Mehta
September 2001     ISBN: 1560254491

One of the literary world's most versatile and surprising writers (and famously private about his personal life) tells a hair-raising story of four beautiful women who drove him to extremes of hope and despair.

"As I sit down to write this letter, I scarcely know how to address you. 'Love' or 'darling' or 'sweetheart' belong to the distant past. Yet each of you lives in my memory the way you were.... I was prompted to write this book about each of you because of a long and profound interior journey that I started and that has altered my life. And yet, strangely, it was not taken alone. All of you came along with me....

"By publishing an account of our private romantic relationships, I am taking the strangers who will read it into my confidence. They will sit in judgment on us--on what was done, what was said, and what was not said. But if there is any embarrassment at the revelations in the text, or blame for all the things that went horribly wrong, it will attach only to me....

"When we were seeing each other (how, even today, the word seeing mesmerizes me), the fact of my blindness was never mentioned, referred to, or alluded to. I now understand that, at the time, I was in the grip of the fantasy that I could see."

"A mesmerizing account,...captivating...arresting...mind-expanding." - Booklist

"Mehta gives eyes to our understanding of courage." --Cynthia Ozick

Ved Mehta was a staff writer at The New Yorker for 33 years. He has been a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has held the Rosencrantz chair in Writing at Yale University. All For Love is an independent book in a continuing literary autobiography, Continents of Exile. The earlier books in the series are Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Up at Oxford, The Stolen Light, Sound Shadows of the New World, The Ledge Between the Streams, Vedi, Mamaji and Daddyji. His other books include Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, Portrait of India, and Fly and The Fly-Bottle.