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"  As a literary trope, the May\u2013December marriage has typically served as a heroine&amp;#039;s great fear, punishment, or indignity. In her strikingly unconventional new novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), narrated by a woman 30 years younger than her spouse, Rebecca Miller turns the clich\u00E9; on its head.  Pippa Lee has spent her adult life slavishly doting on her publisher husband, Herb, and their two children. But when Herb turns 80 and moves the pair into a retirement community, Pippa begins to dwell on her youth, when she was a Warholian muse, a runaway junkie who attached herself to people with an excess of talent, experience, or perversity: &amp;quot;[L]ike a wolf domesticated by humans, I caught a scent of my old ways and felt hemmed in.&amp;quot; At the same time that she&amp;#039;s becoming increasingly aware of Herb&amp;#039;s mortality, Pippa starts having unsettling sleepwalking episodes that keep leading her to her neighbor&amp;#039;s adult son. At first, Pippa thinks she&amp;#039;s going crazy, but eventually she realizes she&amp;#039;s waking up to a new phase of her life.  Miller, who is married to Daniel Day Lewis and is Arthur Miller&amp;#039;s daughter, was a painter before she turned to film; she wrote and directed The Ballad of Jack and Rose and a movie version of her story collection, Personal Velocity, and she is doing the same with Pippa Lee (due next year, with Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, and Keanu Reeves in the lead roles).  A much quieter, more intimate look at a marriage&amp;#039;s inner workings is offered up by Glenda Burgess in her moving debut memoir, The Geography of Love (Broadway). Like the fictional Pippa, Burgess married a man who surpassed her in years (13) and corporate rank, and she took naturally to the role of devoted wife and mother. The couple enjoyed a passionate courtship, and Burgess shows us how they managed to sustain their romance through the years. Then, just when it all seems too good to be true, their lives are shattered when Ken, a healthy athlete in his fifties, is diagnosed with lung cancer. With her mother also wasting away from the same disease, Burgess draws upon Ken&amp;#039;s lessons of courage and optimism in order to become the family&amp;#039;s rock. Both Burgess&amp;#039; tender recollections and Miller&amp;#039;s more pragmatic imaginings remind us that we tend to be defined by our great loves well after we have outlived them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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