This Familiar Heart

Babette Fraser Hale’s latest book, entitled This Familiar Heart, appears at first to evoke a sort of seventies Love Story theme. That movie, starring Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neil, though one of the best box office hits of its time, was criticized for its “hollow lines.” Hale’s book, based on her romance and later marriage to Leon Hale, a beloved columnist for Houston newspapers for over sixty years, is much more honest and ten times as electric. The cover warns that this book is “an improbable love story.” It truly is quite unbelievable, but what a loving tribute and beautiful exposé of over forty years of partnership between two writers—two writers who married when Babette was forty-six with a young son and Leon was sixty-nine, trying to shake his habit of cutting and running when things got tough in a relationship.

Leon, a man conscious of his fibrous dysplasia, a condition that affected his eyes and facial symmetry, comes across as a sort of lovable cat of nine lives. After he survived two bouts of cancer, a terrible car crash, and two previous marriages, along comes Babette. She is a young, talented beauty who pursues this man whose persona, as his readers are well aware, is averse to wealth, privilege, and  “her kind” of people from River Oaks. This irony is never lost on Leon. In fact, it haunts him for years. He wonders how his readers would react if they knew he was dating such a young former socialite. He is aware that guests and acquaintances are often wondering what the two see in each other.

This love story is filled with the wisdom of Babette Fraser Hale, who, at being left alone for maybe the first time in her life, writes: “…it seemed to me that I had been the fortunate recipient of nearly forty years of the happiest partnership and marriage I could have imagined.” For this couple, love didn’t mean “never having to say you’re sorry.” Rather, it meant apologizing and figuring out how to make things better. Babette is wracked with doubts and frustrations while trying to do the right things in Leon’s final days, but there are challenges, including care during the Covid-19 pandemic and what seems to be an untimely, rather late, cancer diagnosis. Leon was ninety-nine years and ten months at the time of his passing.

I highly recommend this book to mature women. The reader will be whisked away on various escapades with the couple as well as tormented by wondering if this relationship can ever work. Babette Fraser Hale manages to tell both sides of their stories with skill and empathy. Although the writing may seem to lose direction momentarily toward the end, this parallels the heart and mind of a surviving spouse who has just lost the love of her life. It is understandable.