The Trouble With Love (Stories)
YWR #130
I’m told by the writer(s) I know, and also by Reddit which tells me everything else, that publishing does not consider a book to be a Love Story unless there’s a happy ending. Usually as a romance. You may explore different paths and tropes to get there, but the Happily Ever After (HEA, it’s a thing) is apparently non-negotiable.
If you’ve been around these here newsletter parts for more than thirty seconds, you know your girl does not turn her nose up at a happy ending. More happiness in the world, I say! Happiness for all! Peace! Love! Art! Five lambs! Si se puede!
But on the other hand - welcome to life, where love is jagged, and unpredictable, and sometimes devastating, and even the things we want most desperately do not come to pass, or do come to pass but don’t work out, and sometimes love is not romance but the tricky bonds between many different people. Many times, great romances end. So I’m grateful to those stories that show love in different forms, and at different stages, even the end. It can make for unsettling, thoughtful reading, and I think it can also make us feel seen, and held, when our own love might not not feel perfect.
This week offers a few books of love, from a different angle. (But if you only want your HEAs, I got you - or should I say, the archive has you?)
Power Summary: When Jess finds herself as the only Black woman in her new Goldman Sachs class, she’s even less thrilled to find out that she’ll be paired with Josh, a white, conservative guy from her college courses. Their enmity turns into friendship, and then something more, all while the cultural landscape shifts around them.
Everything’s Fine received a LOT of praise when it came out this summer, and I think it’s pretty well deserved. It takes a confident author to write about office politics, and race, and love, and what happens when one person supports Trump and another does not, and to have it all feel uneasy but also believable. At its core, the Jess and Josh love story does not totally tip its hand in that you see absolutely why they love each other, and absolutely why there are reasons it won’t work out, and absolutely why there are reasons it could. And whether love conquers all. A smart debut.
Did you skip over the link to the Gentle Lamb explanation key? That’s okay! Here it is again to explain just what these little lambies are doing in this newsletter.
Power summary: Barnett is coming to his mother’s Louisiana farm with a surprise - he’s getting married. To his boyfriend, whom she’s never met. At her farm. In two weeks.
With a title like Big Gay Wedding and a summary like that, I expected this to be a fizzy romp through wedding planning shenanigans (plananigans?) And certainly there were those elements, including an Applebee’s catered rehearsal dinner. There’s some Schitt’s Creekiness about the whole thing, in its humor and warm-heartedness.
But what made this much more than a glitter ball were the other love stories around the grooms: Barnett and his mother, who has known he was gay but can’t quite wrap her head around it. His mother and the town, which makes it clear that a big gay wedding isn’t welcome. His mother and her misfit farm animals, which is way more poignant than it sounds. What the obligations of love are to each other. I actually ugly cried my way through as much of this as I laughed. It reminded me how many complicated feelings can come up around weddings, because - life!
Yes, it is I, your friendly neighborhood reader, burning up your inboxes with a 40-year-old-book, you are absolutely welcome for this timely recommendation.
Power summary: A thinly fictionalized retelling of Ephron’s husband’s affair and their subsequent divorce, told through the eyes of food writer Rachel Samstat, who’s seven months pregnant when she finds out that her husband is in love with another woman.
Okay, you guys? Is Heartburn a good companion read to The Year of Magical Thinking? (Ducks, runs for cover from the hordes of murderous Joan Didion fans who are absolutely apoplectic about this comparison.)
But listen. Not only is Heartburn extremely voicey in a way that you rarely get with fiction, so deeply personal and wounded and also funny, but it also does such specific work in showing how common, how ludicrously mundane, how messily human divorce can be. Like TYoMT!
Extremely hot take aside, this book definitely feels late Seventies-early Eighties in a lot of ways. It’s dated. But I still loved how real this very unhappy ending felt.
Tell me your most complicated love story recommendation in the comments! Or, I guess, send me your college thesis on Joan Didion and why she would absolutely decimate me for the comparison with jokey Nora Ephron. Harsh but fair.
It’s “Books I’ve Never Heard Of” Book Awards Season!
Congratulations to:
Nobel Prize in literature winner: Jon Fosse
I’ll quote The Economist because it much more cogently said what I felt:
“The announcement of the winner of the Nobel prize in literature usually prompts one of three reactions. The first is “Who?”; the second is “Why?”; the third—and by far the rarest—is “Hurrah!” This year, the reaction was firmly in the first two camps. On October 5th Jon Fosse, a Norwegian, was awarded the most prestigious writing prize in the world. Most literary buffs had never heard of him.”
National Book Award finalists: I’ve heard of (and read) 1 out of 20
Booker Prize finalists: I’ve heard of 1 out of 6
This is absolutely abysmal reading math. And - please. I’m begging you all. If any of you have read something by Jon Fosse. Stand up and make yourselves known. Though if you do I will absolutely conscript you into a newsletter interview so …
Current Reading Queue:
The Guest
The Ballerinas
King: A Life
All links this week go to Orinda Books, an independent bookstore in the Bay Area. Thank you, Kira, for being a great reader and for nominating a cute indie bookstore. Yes, you COULD buy books from Amazon, but you know Jeff doesn’t care about your reading happiness. And I’m pretty sure the owners of Orinda Books do.
Who / why on repeat
It's usually HEA, but "happy for now" also works. Fun fact: Byron Lane is married to Steven Rowley (The Guncle).