MY BLACK GIRLFRIEND is the thrilling account of writer Irwin Greenstein, who after enjoying a high-flying urban life, finds himself living in the Southern Bible Belt town of Thomasville, Georgia where his wife of fifty years dies from cancer. It’s a fish-out-of-water story that touches on grief and the cultural and religious challenges of a Baby Boomer man finding himself single in an alien, and even hostile, environment. MY BLACK GIRLFRIEND shatters all preconceptions of online dating and sex among Baby Boomers. Irwin adopts absurd and amusing methods to get erections after being the caregiver to his wife for the three years that she suffered from cancer. Although MY BLACK GIRLFRIEND has a strong linear narrative constructed around Irwin’s crazy and humorous online dating experiences, the story keeps circling back to his late wife Allison. Child-free with a highly disposable income and hedonistic approach to money, Irwin shares how their impulsive self-indulgence was the glue to a highly successful marriage of five decades. It’s extremely rare to find the love of your life, and when you do, to keep that connection intact and thriving. He describes how the intimate space of their homes in cities such as New York, Miami, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Boston, Baltimore and elsewhere served as sanctuaries in a relationship that was extremely private. By jointly decorating and renovating their homes, the couple developed an immutable bond of aesthetics and romance that expressed the inner beauty of their love. It seems that novels, memoirs and autofiction seem to focus on struggling through the incompatibilities of relationship in terms of achieving personal freedom and self-actualization. By comparison, MY BLACK GIRLFRIEND bounces between the death of ideal love and the quest to regain it. How does an urban man, who lived an idyllic marriage for most of his life, manage his romantic expectations in an agricultural region where literally many women have never left their home turf? With a name like Irwin Greenstein, there’s no getting around the fact that he’s Jewish in a largely Southern Baptist region – depicting the biases he encounters as he tries to rebuild his life. The process starts with overcoming grief. For the first several months after Allison’s death, Irwin rails against the gods amid crying jags. He talks to her constantly. He sees her everywhere in the house. After about six months, though, he faces the hard reality that he can’t continue to live that way. He begins hitting the few bars in town, trying to meet women – unsuccessfully. Then he resorts to the one thing he promised himself he’d never do: online dating. Structurally, MY BLACK GIRLFRIEND portrays each new relationship in a separate chapter that starts with the initial online contact, first date, tentative development, the romantic convolutions and ultimately disappointment. Each chapter uses the relationship as an opportunity to discuss love and compatibility in South Georgia where both would seem to undermine his success. After about eighteen months of online dating, one night, an dating site that he hasn’t heard from in months, sends a recommendation. It’s a knock-out gorgeous African American woman with a Jewish last time who also lives in Thomasville. He fires off a message, she replies. Her name is Ava and she’s from Philadelphia. They meet at Starbucks for a first date. She admits later that it was love at first sight for her, or as she later described it “I feel like I fell in love with you before we even met.” Irwin is completely captivated. They date a few times and, around town, feel the seething undercurrent of racism from people who see them. Undaunted, they flaunt it as she dresses to kill and they make appearances in his vintage Porsche. It turns out that, in fact, she was Jewish. Her first husband who she married in her early twenties was Jewish, and after ten years he was shot to death in a robbery in Philadelphia. Several years later, she married a Jewish neurologist in New Jersey and converted for him to get married. She ended up in Thomasville after meeting a man online and moving there to live with him. She didn’t realize, until it was too late, that he was an alcoholic. Ava would never go into a bar alone, and for six years searched for a man online. She said it devastated her life. Although there’s a strong sexual attraction between Ava and Irwin, she wants to wait ninety days before they consummate the relationship, which is were the book begins. Not trusting herself to be alone in either of their places, the couple has lots of Baby Boomer car sex in his Porsche. During that period, they fall in love, grateful to have found each other. MY BLACK GIRLFRIEND concludes with Ava and Irwin moving in together. All indications are that their relationship will last. They flout the pervasive undercurrent of racial divide that still permeates day-to-day life in the South. MY BLACK GIRLFRIEND ultimately proves that, against apparent odds, love can be found in the most improbable places. # # #