Hard to Love
Essays and Confessions
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A sharp and entertaining essay collection about the importance of multiple forms of love and friendship in a world designed for couples, from a laser-precise new voice.
Sometimes it seems like there are two American creeds, self-reliance and marriage, and neither of them is mine. I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others' love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers.
Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honors the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary--friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back. She draws from personal experience, sharing stories about her loving but combative family, the fiercely independent Emerson scholar who pushed her away, and the friends who have become her invented or found family; pop culture touchstones like the Women's March, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and the timeless series Cheers; and the work of writers like Joan Didion, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O'Connor, and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick like you've never seen it!).
Hard to Love pays homage and attention to unlikely friends and lovers both real and fictional. It is a series of love letters to the meaningful, if underappreciated, forms of intimacy and community that are tricky, tangled, and tough, but ultimately sustaining.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hopper debuts with a smart group of essays on contemporary relationships. A literature scholar, Hopper cultivates a voice that is sophisticated and analytical, but also earnest and eager, and her strongest essays balance these qualities. In "Spinsters," her treatise on female friendship, she shares fond memories from her life, such as of falling asleep to a friend's voice on the phone, while decrying how the "arbitrary conflation of marriage with the commitments and responsibilities of adult life sometimes turns unmarried people into second-class citizens, while devaluing many necessary kinds of love." Hopper also skillfully uses personal anecdote in a piece on how caring for a friend with cancer is both "the most adult thing... and the most adolescent thing," because it requires negotiating health insurance policies, but also "willful wish-fulfillment" in the periods between treatments. Only rarely is she less successful, as in a disappointingly banal piece on "How to Be Single." Much more often, she demonstrates how being deeply personal with the people in one's life can help one to be critically engaged. "I think about writing and hoarding together," she says, after describing the hoarders in her family, in that "so much has to be serendipitously discovered and rediscovered and collected and stored." There is some to be passed over in these essays, but there is much more to be discovered.
