In 1998 the author Jennifer Beth Cohen embarked on a fateful adventure, seeking love and livelihood in Moscow. She found both, if only fleetingly. What transpired over the course of a year would become the agonizing substance of her first book, the coming-of-age memoir Lying Together: My Russian Affair.

Cohen, a native New Yorker, returned to Manhattan in 1999 where she immersed herself in the painstaking work of recounting her personal and professional saga in the pages of a tell-all memoir. Terrace Books, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, published the book in 2004.

Jennifer Beth Cohen

It doesn't bother me so much, the strangers. It's the acquaintances that's a little scarier. My colleagues reading about me being on antidepressants or sexual relationships I had — those aren't things you normally talk about at work, ever. But the thing is, the more I thought about it, the more I realized: everybody at work has their skeletons. It's pretty obvious; we know that. The only difference is, I've put mine in a book and it's available to everyone.
Jennifer Beth Cohen

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On the eve of Lying Together's commercial release last September, sound producer Andy Miles had a chance meeting with the author in a Washington, D.C. bookstore. He quickly recognized — in both the book and its first-time-published author — the compelling stuff of documentary and went to work on what would become (the looking for love part).

Andy Miles

The documentary charts a sequence of events that took place over six years, from the decision Cohen made to go to Russia, in search of the perfect man and the perfect career, to the decision by Terrace Books to publish her manuscript. Examining both the writing and the selling of the book, (the looking for love part) interjects the comments of Cohen, her friends, family and associates close to the memoir.

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I knew a great deal of what was happening while this experience in her life was going on. And to read about it many years later is not as overwhelming for me in any respect as it was while this extraordinary experience was going on for her — because there were moments that I was fearful for her. And she came out in an extraordinary way.
Sue Cohen, the author's mother

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Production of the documentary and accompanying Web site occurred between September 2004 and February 2005. Interviews were conducted in Washington, D.C., New York and New Jersey between September and December.

 

© 2005
Stephen Andrew Miles