"LOVE, GLORIA" is a love story, or a story about love. At any rate, it's the best story I know.

It's 1972. I am sixteen years old.

I am living with my mother, who has raised me on her own since I was three. .

. My mother is able to live in the moment better than anyone I know, to find joy in the present.

She has a smile that is incandescent and a laugh that is musical and full. She dyes her hair a fire-engine red and wears it piled high, dresses in the brightest scarlets and yellows and greens.

On others it might look gaudy or cheap but on her it looks grand. In reality her hair was once a deep auburn, I know that from the photos of her before I was born.

Now under the dye it is turning a steel gray. Which is fitting, for beneath all her frivolity and color there is a part of her that is steel as well.

Her constancy, her will. I know this too: my mother did not love my father.

She loves me. " Thus begins acclaimed writer Marc Scott Zicree's most personal work, a memoir of his mother's journey from darkness to light, and how, through saving another damaged soul's life and heart, she learned to love.

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and to pass on that gift to her son. More than that, it is a profoundly moving tale of how we midwife one another from birth through life into death - and how the deepest bonds endure the decades through joy and sorrow and beyond.

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