"For hundreds of years the description of love was left to poets and novelists. For example, here is Jane Austen showing how lovers behaved differently than the rest of us: "For though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is ever made, till it has been made at least twenty times over." Graphic, succinct, and oh so true. But not good enough for today. For as the automobile replaced the horse-drawn carriage, so scientists-brain chemists and evolutionary biologists-are replacing the novelists in the study of love. Today, for an acceptable description of love and its effects, only the whole truth and nothing but the truth will suffice. The author as a creator-of narrative, of character, of what is included and what is not-is not relevant to the scientific investigation of love. That is why Children Of An Idle Brain is told exactly as it happened. It isn't a novel. It isn't even "based on real events." It is real events, a true love story, told as it happened, over the time it happened. In effect a case study of middle class American love in the second half of the twentieth century."