Shirley Abbott's delightful new memoir offers a completely original map of modern love. Taking Casanova as her mentor, Abbott charts her own amorous education as a woman coming of emotional age in the second half of the twentieth century.

Abbott's search for the romantic ideal, informed by movies and popular songs and fed by inevitable infatuations, began when she was a young girl in the South. It was the beginning of a lifelong journey that took her to Paris as a student of love and culture, to New York as a young professional, through enthralling passions and crushing disappointments, through marriage and parenthood and divorce and beyond. Forever entranced by the idea of love, Abbott found that reality often came up short, as women like her continually redefined their roles in relation to men. The questions she posed for herself along the way are questions for every woman today: Where do we find love? What bargains do we make to maintain it? Why are our expectations so often unfulfilled?

Written in the invitingly wry and gracefully observant voice that has charmed readers of Abbott's earlier memoirs, Love's Apprentice will resonate deeply with every woman who, despite her hard-earned knowledge of the limitations of love, will not be cured of it. As the Boston Globe said of Womenfolks, "Reading it gives us the courage and energy to ask who we really are".