Just Friends

An extraordinary accomplishment, Just Friends, A Love Story is a unique novel in the grand tradition of Proust, Mann, Genet and Kosinski. However, it is more: Donald Motier has created a moving contemporary psychological/philosophical novel that on one hand is an unconventional love story and on the other a history of the changing mores of the last third of the 20th century. Just Friends, A Love Story is the tale of Daniel and Joel who meet in 1966 while Daniel is a student at a small Pennsylvania college and Joel a boy who lives in the college town. Although their love for each other is intense and they soon become inseparable, it remains innocent and chaste. However, because of their age difference, they soon attract the attention of suspicious minds and are cruelly separated despite both their protestations that they are "just friends". They are both devastated. Daniel turns to sex addiction and Joel to drug addiction to mask the pain. After nine years of separation, they have a reunion in the old college town. However, both fearing the other has changed and fearing rejection, they cover-up their feelings with pleasantries and again separate unfulfilled. Ten more years pass. They meet again and both weary of their addictions and loneliness, realize that although their lives had turned out to be very different, neither had, before nor since, ever loved another human being as they had loved each other. In the end, this stirring and heart wrenching novel is the story of childhood abuse, love found and lost, the despair of separation and addiction, and finally a return to innocence, proving that love, in any form, is the only redemption.