(Mythili Rao/WNYC)
At the Miami Book Fair International, The Takeaway gathered five novelists to discuss their experiences with love. Christopher Beha's novel "What Happened to Sophie Wilder" explores the conflicts between religious and romantic love. Jami Attenberg's most recent novel, "The Middlesteins" follows the travails of a dysfunctional but loving Midwestern family across three generations.
In "Wingshooters," Nina Revoyr explores themes of justice, loyalty, prejudice, and love in a small town in Wisconsin. Robert Goolrick tells the story of the aftermath of a big love in a small town. And the protagonist of Scott Hutchins' novel, "A Working Theory of Love," works for a tech company which is using his deceased father's diaries to program a computer to simulate human intelligence.
"To me, love is the most elusive thing in the world when you don't have it," Robert Goolrick says. "And then, when you do have it, it is so inevitable that it seems impossible that it wasn't always there."
"We're also talking about love as a kind of static state," Scott Hutchins says. He argues that, if love is a magic trick, it is a magic trick we must keep pulling off, everyday.
But Jami Attenberg did not want to have a dispassionate or academic conversation. "This is love that we're talking about here," Attenberg says. "It's very messy…and dangerous, and exciting, and passionate, and sexy."
Head over to our Love and Death page for more on each of the writers, and to hear the first part of the discussion on writing about death.
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Comments [5]
This conversation reeks of complacency and projection. Everything about "love" is discussed except the two things that most determine one's success in attracting a partner -- looks and class. All of these people are successful in their fields. It's natural, therefore, that their "social capital", if you will, is exponentially higher than for the majority of working people. But yet they prattle on about how, like the Mary Tyler Moore theme, It's "all around" if you just "love yourself," blah, blah, blah. Not true. There are many very good people who lead full lives, yet are not "in love", and, conversely, very bad people energetically pursuing narrow, selfish goals, who have one "love" after another. Look closely, and it's largely looks and class, (not to mentional heterosexuality -- your odds are far greater in general!) that set one's chances.
How can he defend the position that you can not love without being loved as a child? The arrogance of such a declaration is astounding.
I "love" these comments. However, ask the experts about love when one is served with divorce papers and has to sleep on the floor for six years or more? Love is biology controlled by forces of reproduction - read Blake's pome about love which ends "love you are the ruler of all of these".
Love is a spell cast by a strange pixie who then sprinkles magic dust on the couple and disappears...Nobody knows how long the the spell will last.
I am a middle aged man 52, who has been married three times. My joke about it is that I get married once every decade. People have opinions about me because I have been married three times and they can be negative.
I won't allow my attempts at "love lasting forever" be a complete negative, though it can be a downer ( I have to deal with my last ex everyday,we have two great kids together and I am with them everyday after school and before I go to work. She began hating me for not tolerating her neurotic behavior anymore. Understandable actually. I didn't want to be abused anymore and she was pissed.)
Love for me was a grounding force of learning about life and death and finding out about myself and who I am.
I am in a new relationship for the last two years and the relationship feels like it will last...It is a road of hard work and when it fails has made me miserable. Still I strive and believe and when I work it with a partner, it feels like it will "last forever."
I don't think much about death, it is inevitable & happens in it's own time. Love is tranformative, it is a gift, it is a responsibility. Love is translucent and sometimes opaque; it is family; it is life.
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