⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(5 Stars) Some love stories end when two people separate. Others continue privately for decades, changing shape as memory, regret, humor, and time work on them. Spetz's Magnetic North: Navigating Love and Life with a Busted Binnacle belongs firmly to the second kind. Calling it simply a romantic memoir would miss what makes the book interesting. Yes, there is a woman named Valerie North at its center. There is attraction, dating, heartbreak, jealousy, bad judgment, second chances, and one snowy kiss that becomes almost mythic in the narrator's memory. But Valerie is ultimately less the destination of this memoir than the point from which Spetz begins measuring everything else. Magnetic North is less about losing a woman than discovering what remained lost inside the man who loved her. Spetz tells the story with an unmistakable comic voice. He argues with himself, talks to the universe, turns emotional disasters into movie scenes, drops pop-culture references into serious ...
