Journalist and professor Kate Walter reads from her debut memoir: Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing (Heliotrope Books)
 
Reception at 7

Reading at 7:30
 
How long does it take to get over heartache? Journalist and teacher Kate Walter wondered if she’d ever feel whole again after her long term lesbian partnership ended.
 
A resident of Greenwich Village who spent years recording neighborhood life, Walter now releases her debut memoir Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing (Heliotrope Books, June 2015).
 
Dedicated to “women who have been dumped after 25 years,” Walter’s memoir describes her broke, brokenhearted state after being left by her partner of two decades. While many older women—gay and straight—experience divorce, Walter’s was more stressful since she was not legally married. But rather than dwelling in regret, Looking for Kiss carries a universal message about loss and recovery: you can heal your life and land up in a better place.
 
With brave and revealing details, Walter confesses her grief and rage and questions her past choices. Seeking answers and spiritual solace, she joins a gay-positive church, visits psychics, throws herself into yoga and chanting, and starts dating again at 60.
 
Like the urban landscape that serves as her backdrop, Walter’s fast-paced dialogue has a raspy realness and soulful edge. She describes loneliness and longing with humorous and poetic prose. Anyone seeking hope will cheer this funny, gutsy narrator who loses love but finds herself.

Kate Walter has been living in downtown Manhattan since 1975 when she escaped across the river from New Jersey. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Newsday, New York Daily News, AM-NY, the Advocate and many other outlets. She teaches writing at CUNY and NYU