A memoir with the ring of romance

If you didn't know it was a memoir, you'd say it was a romance novel.

Luisita López Torregrosa's new Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pp., $25) has a heady mix of revolution, danger, fearless journalism, and same-sex romance, at a time when it was less open and less accepted, nurtured under pressure of mobs and bullets, a romance spanning years and continents. There's elation and uncertainty, laughter and heartbreak. And poetry in the telling.

Even Torregrosa, who reads from her work at Giovanni's Room at 5:30 p.m. next Thursday, says it's like a novel.

"I know it all really happened to me, and happened just in this way," she says by phone from Manhattan, "and when I was writing it, I revisited so many emotions, but when I step back and look at the story, yes, it's hard to believe."

Born in Puerto Rico, Torregrosa, 69, eventually moved Stateside, to Brooklyn, and a multifarious life as a newspaper editor and writer. She was assistant foreign editor at The Inquirer in the 1980s, and also has been an assistant national editor at the New York Times. She has freelance credits at Vogue, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, and elsewhere, and now wears a lot of hats, with a column for the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times global editions, as well as being a correspondent for Politics Daily.

As Before the Rain opens, Torregrosa, an editor at a major urban daily, falls in love with a foreign correspondent, a woman she names Elizabeth. "I have changed some names and places," Torregrosa says, "because my purpose was to tell this story, not hurt people." Even Philadelphia goes unnamed - "although, if you ever lived in Philadelphia," she says, "you will recognize the neighborhood where the book begins."

She visits Elizabeth in the Philippines, where Elizabeth is covering the social unrest cresting into the People Power Revolution that unseats President Ferdinand Marcos. Their involvement grows and grows. Near the end of an idyllic day at Matabungkay Beach, connection happens:

I knew at that instant, with her face beside me and the wisps of smoke in the hills beyond, that I had found myself a place; nothing I had known before had captured me in quite this way, with such sudden passion.

She returns to the paper and tells the head editor she will take a leave of absence to write a book on the Philippines. Although the editor is outwardly encouraging, "I guessed, reading the expression in his eyes, hooded and dark, that he believed I was making the mistake of my life."

She moves in with Elizabeth in Manila, and they pursue journalism and love in a country in upheaval.

"There are so many things so very exciting, very evocative, traveling to a foreign country, being in love, and in a revolution," says Torregrosa. "The People Power Revolution, remember, was the No. 1 story in the world in 1986, such excitement and danger." Amid this "great, combustible mix of things," their connection grows deeper and more intense.

Torregrosa makes herself into a foreign correspondent, filing stories on the unrest in Manila, as well as in South Korea, for the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers. "I think of this book as my romance with journalism," Torregrosa says. "Being in a foreign country, so moody, atmospheric, and you're working together."

Besides the violence and mass movement outside their Manila apartment, the women live in the supercharged world of foreign correspondents.

"They're such a small, close-knit group," she says. "Everybody you know are having their affairs and living their lives, and you're together professionally, and you know everything about each other. There's such an acceptance and camaraderie - mixed, understand, with great competition."

In her 2004 memoir, The Noise of Infinite Longing, Torregrosa traced how her family relationships changed as the family dispersed after their early lives in Puerto Rico. Again in Before the Rain, the question arises: When we move back to the States, will the love remain?

Is this a Torregrosa theme: how things change when context changes, how love is, to some extent, a product of its surroundings? "I've thought about that question seriously for a long time," she says. "Our loves do not live outside the context in which we are. We are affected whether we acknowledge it or not. Context, age, years passing, changes people and changes love."

Yet this accomplished journalist holds out for a belief in true love: "I do believe that some loves are immutable, but that doesn't mean that the people involved don't change."

It was also important to her to portray a same-sex relationship arising "in a time when it was less open, less accepted." Stateside, the couple have a circle of supportive friends, but awkwardness persists. When she and Elizabeth revisit the paper, some of their colleagues,

even old friends, did not quite know what to say to us. What could they say? Gossip had gone around. We did not fit the picture anymore. . . . I had crossed the line - I had fallen in love with a reporter, a married woman.

Torregrosa says that in the Philippines, "until near the end, I saw next to none of the judgmental ways that you'd expect in such a devout Catholic country. Maybe, being foreigners, we were given a pass by the people around us. 'Those crazy foreigners' kind of thing."

Did being a journalist make it easier to write such a memoir? "Not at all," she says with a laugh. "As a reporter, you use the tools and methods of journalism. For memoir, all that has to go out the window. One must be fluid, yourself, novelistic, expressive, and the other is totally different. They fight each other, they don't complement."

Even after love is over, she says, people keep loving in well-tended pockets of themselves. Is that true with her, regarding Elizabeth? "Absolutely. No doubt of that."

And is that where Before the Rain came from?

"I don't know," says Torregrosa. "I know that I haven't been inclined to write about other relationships I've had. This one had all these things we've been talking about. It is what the book is. I stand by the book."