When I was in high school, in my first English class that really investigated the short story, we read Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies. Until then, I’d had my head in the clouds. After reading fairy tales and rom-coms and everyone-lived-happily-ever-after books, I believed that a love story meant romance at all costs, throwing one’s head back in freedom, in intimacy, in glee.
But Lahiri’s stories about pregnancy loss, unrequited love, war and cultural identity were actually love stories. Hope that prevails against the backdrop of hardship, fatigue, disaster, impossibility, against the eternal truth that life that is cruel and cutting is love. And is, I thought, love that’s worth reading about.
When I tell people the title of my new book, This Is a Love Story, I tend to get the same response most of the time: “So it’s romance? A real love story?”
The answer is twofold. Yes, there is romance in the book. It is the story of an artist and a writer. It witnesses their careers, parenthood, an affair, aging over fifty years. Certainly, there is trust and intimacy, shared experience, and growth. The novel is, at its core, a love story. But there are no longing gazes and stolen kisses. There is no good sex.
As a reader and writer, I’ve learned that love, at its best is hard-won, or at least it is conscious of its own luck when it’s got it. And so, the love stories that really get me going these days, these impossible days, are the ones about grief and loss and exhaustion: love in the face of that, love because of that, love when it isn’t free.
Here are some goodies to that end. They do not sugarcoat the inescapable fact that love is a heavy lift. Why? Because it isn’t glory that is life-affirming. It is life that affirms life. And life is a heavy lift.
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Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
In a series of love letters from a son to his mother who cannot read, Little Dog, our protagonist, investigates generational trauma, war, his identity and sexuality as a Vietnamese immigrant and gay man, the incredible power of storytelling, and abuse at the hands of his mother and peers.
Vuong is an absolute master of language, at articulating in surprising metaphor the deepest of human emotion. A sex scene in this novel is etched in my head forever and like none other—the rawness of it is the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever read.
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Oh, this perfect, beautiful, nuanced second person novella will forever have my heart. It opens with the narrator reminiscing on previous relationships and takes us bit by bit to the present where she is married, has a child, is unenthused at work, is dealing with bedbugs, boredom, finances, and navigating her husband’s affair.
Everything, mostly, is utterly commonplace—or feels that way from where I stand—but in Offill’s expert, original way and her incredible grace with language, is novel and revelatory and achingly beautiful. All the things: what it is to enter middle age, to be a spouse, a mother feel fresh and nuanced.
And one is left with the deep, heartening feeling of being less alone even in the muck. Especially maybe.
Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
Against the beautiful backdrop of the Italian Riviera, Elio, an introspective, naïve seventeen-year-old falls for Oliver, an older, charming, American scholar who comes to visit Elio’s family villa for six weeks. This novel is…hot. It aches with desire. It is about first love, infatuation, vulnerability, obsession. A lot happens under that roof.
That said, it is equally about nostalgia, as it’s told from some unknown later date after one has married and one has not. And though there is no bang or break, no one does anything awful to the other, there is a feeling that the wrecking ball can also be time. Just time.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day
It has to be this one, right? For decades, Stevens was the butler of Darlington Hall, one of the great and revered English houses in the 1920s. As an older man, he takes a road trip to the home of an unrequited love, a former colleague at Darlington, Miss Kenton who is now many years married and moved on.
Stevens’ whole life, it becomes clear has been a blind testament to duty, dignity, legacy, and fealty to employer who was never worthy at best. Again and again, Stevens has prioritized loyalty to his career over love and here we are, remains of the day. Nothing left. And oh, the ache. For him. For us. All around.
Emma Straub, Modern Lovers
Emma Straub is the most delightful writer and this novel is perhaps my favorite of hers. It follows a group of former punk rock bandmates who met at Oberlin College in 1980s to Brooklyn, present day where they have families and careers and the shared sadness of a friend’s death.
Though there is particular focus on time passing, secrets, trauma that hasn’t been worked through and parental love, what strikes me most is Straub’s masterful handling of shifting the love dynamics in a close-knit long-term friend group.
Julian Barnes, The Only Story
The agonized—truly, this one is bleak but beloved!—memory of a romance fifty years prior is the heart of this novel, an aching exploration of memory, missteps, and the way that a love can change not only our life’s path but the essence of who we are.
An Englishman remembers a romance with a woman, thirty years his senior, who he met playing tennis doubles as the only story that matters in his life. It makes us wonder, of course, which was the only one that matters in ours.
But perhaps my favorite bit is the super Barnes craft move of switching from first person to second person to third person progressively to suggest the incredible torment of recollection and needing to move further and further away from it just to keep on.
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This Is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer is available via Dutton.
