Jack Lafferty is thirty-five and miserable.  An accomplished Wall Street banker who aches to be a writer, he has bitterly sworn off women after his world-wise, event planner fiancé sleeps with a client just three weeks before their wedding.  But at another wedding, that of a college buddy, Jack meets Sarah Mitchell, a bright and beautiful corporate attorney also living in New York.  Despite Sarah’s clear interest in Jack, and the relentless encouragement of Alex, a comically gifted phrase-master and Jack’s quirky alter ego, Jack insists on wallowing in self-pity and cynicism – a romantic torpor only worsened by an alcohol-fueled one-night rebound with his manipulative ex-fiancé Kim.  By the time his vision finally clears and he realizes what a sensational find Sarah really is, disaster strikes, pushing Sarah away and seemingly beyond reach.  Getting her back will require a move so bold, so daring, that Jack, careful and deliberate by nature, isn’t sure he’s up to the task – until he stumbles into the surprise performance of his life.  

"Love and Other Recreational Sports" takes a brutally honest, often hilarious look at the nature and inscrutable behavior of men and women in twenty-first century Manhattan in an attempt to understand how the most natural of human experiences – boy and girl meet, fall in love and decide to share life together – can become so terribly, painfully complicated.

As you might suspect, though fictional, the novel draws heavily on my own experience over 15 years as a single man in Manhattan (I'm now newly married) and is intended to portray the authentically male take on the confounding topics of love, relationships, sex, commitment and marriage -- how men talk about women and relationships when the women aren't around.  The book also contemplates the intimacy between male friends as they struggle to navigate their relationships with women -- how men confide in, and rely on, each other in their uniquely male, often highly nuanced way.