Necessary Sins (2007)

As a 29-year-old style reporter at The Washington Post, Lynn Darling fell in love with Lee Lescaze, an older (but not wiser) foreign-affairs writer who happened to be married with three kids. Their ''necessary sin'' certainly courts criticism, but as their story unfolds in unpredictable ways in her memoir, you feel compelled to forgive their initial lapse in judgment. Though Darling glazes over her insecurities with self-deprecation (as many journalists do), her prose in Necessary Sins is most revealing when she lets her guard down. Such is the case when she describes breast-feeding her newborn: ''Her mouth [would] open like a drunken sailor's and I would look at her until I drowned.'' B+