Two-Way Traffic

<p>First-ever paperback edition of Joel Lieber's posthumously-published 1972 semi-autobiographical novel <em>Two-Way Traffic</em>. <span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and presented as a series of journal extracts it is the harrowing portrayal of a young successful writer's efforts to reassemble a life shattered by marital problems a bitter custody battle depression anxiety and a suicide attempt. The novel is a barely fictionalized account of the author's last two years and is a frank often heartbreaking work but not without brilliant flashes of humor genuine warmth and optimism.</span></p><p><br></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>From the dust jacket of the 1972 edition:</em></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Jessie Jacobi had built a successful life as a writer: well-received books attractive wife two children. Then it all began to crumble. His marriage collapsed. His writing lost its unity and direction. A decision any decision became all but impossible.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In the second year of my third decade someone else has come to live inside me and I hate that visitor he writes in one of the journals that make up this novel. Beginning with Jesse's collapse the journals record his often indecisive struggle with that unwelcome visitor-through a suicide attempt and the subsequent search for new friends new beliefs and a new understanding of himself.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Joel Lieber has written a frank and penetrating novel an intensely personal chronicle of one man's journey into the depths of his own mind.</span></p>