fly, my darling
available April 2026 from She Writes Press
“A love story in poetic glimpses — glimpses that accumulate to become a sweeping narrative, lyrical and impressionistic and irresistibly compelling.
It’s a smooth, sexy, jazzy delight to read, even when it’s heartbreaking, as love stories almost inevitably are. Ultimately, Fly, My Darling offers us a larger vision — of how unexpectedly love comes, and how capacious it can be, and how it transforms and deepens us.”
— Cecilia Woloch, author of Sur la Route and Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
“In prose that is as close to music as it is to poetry,
Lisa Richter spins a luminous tale of her search for a true self: a complex dance that has her partnering with grievous loss, sultry desire, all forms of art, and above all love.”
— Sands Hall, author of Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology
“Early in her joyous and haunting memoir,
Lisa Richter identifies the challenge and opportunity presented by her new piano teacher:
Take a simple idea and explore it, using everything you’ve learned (not nearly enough), and in real time build tone and rhythm, and birth something authentic, moving, beautiful even.
This is a perfect description of what Richter accomplishes in Fly, My Darling, a tender portrait of a surprising romance that, at mid-life, transformed the author, creating for readers an authentic, moving, beautiful experience that is likely to transform them as well.”
— Lisa Alvarez, author of Some Final Beauty and Other Stories
Just be yourself, Lisa, she said. It’ll make life a whole lot easier.
Lynda Roth entered my life as my jazz piano instructor. An immense musical talent with a renegade past, she was a deeply kind, outspoken woman who enjoyed Scotch and cigarillos and once considered becoming a rabbi. I was a former programmer, a beginning writer, a lapsed Catholic living in a gated community with a husband, daughter, and son.
That our relationship deepened into intimacy was…unexpected, beautiful, tumultuous.
How was I to make sense of those years in the middle of my life?
The wild joy, the nearly unbearable grief, the eroticism, the heart-stopping conflicts: I wrote them out as scenes and fragments, some on index cards, others on snippets of paper, and spread them like scattered pearls throughout my office. I studied them for weeks. What do you want to be?
An intimate narrative, they said, structured in three movements — Allegro, Adagio, Allegro con brio — because this is also a love story of music, and thematically it’s a perfect fit.
Okay, I said. But where does the story begin?
Under a vast blue sky, the air rich with beached sea kelp, salt. That first birdsong afternoon.
“I loved the book. The musical references, the trips back to Italy, to childhood….
All those past memories throughout—tying together the beginning and the end of Lisa and Lynda, like trying to weave in the missing middle they were supposed to have had with each other.”
— Debbie Campbell, songwriter, musician, recording artist