When Phil Potter decides to divorce his wife, Jessica, after a few difficult years, he imagines he’s in for a wild jaunt through the sexually liberated 1970s. But his new start—Phil has also left behind his job in PR for a teaching gig at a junior college—is more solitary drinking and TV dinners than raucous orgies. Even the women he does manage to connect with are equally disaffected with their own divorces or failing marriages, and Phil begins to understand the harsh, though often darkly funny, realities of starting over and searching for love the second time around.

Capturing both the excitement and struggles of feminism and the sexual revolution, Starting Over depicts the pleasures and pitfalls of dating in the seventies with humor and a deep understanding of how relationships work—or, more commonly, don’t work. Replete with spot-on cultural references and rendered under Wakefield’s careful journalistic eye, Starting Over is a stunning reminder of the hardships of love in the modern age.