Bart A. Charlow spent more than 50 years learning how to look — first as a photographer, then as a painter, then as a psychotherapist who spent decades listening to people tell him the truth about their marriages, their affairs, and the parts of themselves they never planned on. He brings all three eyes to his fiction.
Born into the carnival life of a Borscht Belt Catskills hotel family, Bart grew up backstage in the world that later inspired Dirty Dancing — a childhood he chronicled in his memoir, A Catskill Carnival: My Borscht Belt Life Lived, Lost and Loved. That world, its music, its mirrors, its short summers and long consequences, has never fully let him go.
His Lived-In Love™ series continues that story in fiction: honest, unglamorous relationship novels about what adults actually do when love shows up uninvited, late, or twice.
Bart writes primarily from the male point of view — a rare vantage point in a genre that rarely hands men the pen — because he believes men have as much to say about desire, regret, and second chances as anyone, and almost nowhere to say it. His books aren't built on the usual tropes. They're built on what he's actually heard, in therapy rooms and at hotel bars, from people over sixty who are still, stubbornly, falling in love.
It isn't "women's fiction" in the way that shelf label usually gets used — though plenty of women read Bart precisely because his men finally tell the truth. It's a love story for anyone old enough to know love after loss is never simple, and worth writing about anyway.
Beyond books, Charlow also writes “Bart on Art,” a regular column about the visual arts for the San Mateo Daily Journal.
Bart has been a longtime voice on TV, radio, and in print. He was recognized for his service in the United States Congressional Record.
He lives near the California coast and in his heart in the Catskills of his youth.
