High School Sweethearts Reminisce and Reconnect in Walter Bennett’s “The Last First Kiss”
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In this episode 248, we visit with Walter Bennett, author of “The Last First Kiss,” a meditative novel of love and last chances set against the backdrop of an oncoming hurricane in the Outer Banks.
Ace Sinclair welcomes his high school sweetheart, J’Nelle Reade, for a long weekend in his home in the Outer Banks for a weekend of reconnection and reminiscence. The duo search through their memories for betrayals, mistakes, missed chances, and hard truths. Meanwhile, a looming hurricane approaches swiftly, threatening to interrupt their weekend of memories.
New York Times Bestselling author Lee Smith had this to say about the book, “Here is the story of an American generation, the ’60s, of all our lost young loves, and a brilliant meditation on the passing and relevance of time. An approaching hurricane adds increasing drama to the revelations from the past and the growing attraction between these two absolutely real and deeply drawn characters. Walter Bennett has written a compulsively readable novel that rings true all the way through.”
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About the Author:
Walter Bennett is a writer and former lawyer, judge, and law professor residing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His first novel, Leaving Tuscaloosa, won The Alabama Author’s Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and the Crook’s Corner Book Prize for debut novels set in the American South.
He has published short fiction and essays in both print and online journals, including Blackbird, The Courtland Review, Eclipse and Voices. An essay on trout fishing, “Black Quill,” appears in Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing (Skyhorse Publishing, Spring 2012). He has written numerous articles on the law; and a highly acclaimed book: The Lawyer’s Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession (U. Chicago Press, 2001). He is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Additional Endorsements for The Last First Kiss
“The Last First Kiss is the most heartbreakingly honest, profoundly moving novel in years. The book has compelling characters so real you have the sensation they are old friends, a story that is romantic, precise, and without one whiff of the delusional. It is a story that leads to the deepest, most human sense of recognition. The Last First Kiss is for anyone who has fallen in love when young and thought about it later and longed for a second chance. If you are grownup, you need this book now, and if you are young, you will need it soon.”
- Craig Nova, author of The Good Son and Cruisers
“The Last First Kiss is the generous-hearted story of a man and a woman in their seventies, who spend a weekend together in an old beach house, hoping to escape the confusion and pain in their pasts, looking to create something clarifying, even intimate, for the future. There are egrets and herons in these pages, ‘a large doe crossing a finger of water.’ They form the backdrop for this engaging tale about the power and pull of memory, the power and pull of love. I was totally enthralled.”
- Judy Goldman, author of Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap
“Walter Bennett’s literary range is startling. From the surefooted Leaving Tuscaloosa, a coming-of-age novel set in Civil Rights era Alabama, to this new novel, The Last First Kiss. At first blush it seems like a beach romance between old sweethearts with the menace of an impending hurricane adding tension to their reunion. But Bennett rips the covers off their comfort as they revisit the fifty-some years they did not share. He writes with utter authority.”
- Georgann Eubanks, author of Literary Trails of North Carolina and Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction
“Walter Bennett’s The Last First Kiss is a true gem of a novel, finely cut, brilliantly polished, and chosen from excellent stone. He’s taken what could have been a simple love story and imbued it with such honesty, originality, and sincerity that it rises above its genre and into rarely visited territory. Bennett ventures bravely into aspects of life—aging, regret, imperfection, doubt— that most writers glide across or avoid entirely. I admired this book greatly and enjoyed it from first page to last.”
- Roland Merullo, author of Breakfast with Buddha and A Little Love Story
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