The Defender
A former journalist in Ottawa, Toronto, and New York, Rosemary Gosselin earned her Master’s degree in social work at Fordham University New York in 1987, and did post graduate training in Jungian studies at the Westchester Institute. She went on to teach clinical social work in the graduate school at Fordham.
Gosselin first interviewed Leonard Cohen in 1956 as a journalism student: they continued to discuss poetry, prose and life with some intensity. Currently she is in private practice and facilitates dream groups in the Georgian Bay area while working on the second draft of her novel.
The Book
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Leonard Cohen’ s most defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint.
By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.