Dinah Sachs and Asa Thayer have had a love affair, conducted in afternoons stolen from the office of the magazine where they work. But now that the affair is over, Dinah, in an act of lingering passion, invents a narrative of Asa's youth, imagining the events that shaped the "happy, handsome man" who, in her words, "was born to stomp on my heart."

Witty and sexy, funny and immediate, Asa, As I Knew Him is a a seductive dialogue between love and memory, obsession and illusion. "Profound, surprising, and ultimately enlightening . . . Kaysen is a gifted and potent author." --Los Angeles Times

"Susanna Kaysen possesses a lyrical wryness that splendidly evokes . . . all the scents and unnamed sadnesses that lay claim to memory and give us reason to go on." --Boston Globe

"It is a tribute to Kaysen's considerable talent that we easily believe in all her inventions." --The New York Times Book Review

"Luminous." --San Francisco Chronicle