You and I and Love Soup: A Memoir or Two

How did a boy born in Los Angeles, California, in 1924 and a girl born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1939 even meet, let alone end up as husband and wife? You and I and Love Soup is in part a double memoir of Liz Swiertz Newman and her husband Lee Newman. It is also part genealogy, part love letter, and part scrapbook. With a dash of humor, Liz tracks the twists and turns of the life paths that brought them together and explores and comments on the cultural changes over the course of nearly ninety years. Lee was born five years before the Great Depression, and Liz was born fifteen years later, as the country was recovering from it. Still, their families' experiences and common values imprinted upon Lee and Liz in a way that made them quite compatible. The book is organized in periods of time, alternating between the lives of the two, until they meet. It begins with Lee, from his birth to the age of 15, and then from Liz's birth to the age of 13, then back to Lee's experiences during those years and so on-so we know what each is doing during the life of the other before they meet. When they meet, they both are recovering from divorces and both are determined never to marry again. She is a 27-year-old office manager of a small sound-systems firm, and he is a 42-year-old vice-president of a large contracting firm. She has two boys, 5 and 4, and he has five children ranging in age from 17 to 8. What could Lee and Liz possibly have in common? While a fifteen-year age difference might keep some apart, the benefits of their age difference is an intriguing part of their story. During the 1960s, marriages were falling apart and new marriages were forming, often creating blended families. While You and I and Love Soup does not dwell on the blended-family aspect of Lee and Liz's life together, it does offer the promise of much material for another book to come.