I sit down, glass of iced Zubrowka Bison Brand vodka in hand, to consider whether there’s anything wrong with a love story.
I’m acting as a judge for a contest called the Women’s World Cup of Literature, where novels written by women from all the countries participating in the Women’s World Cup (of soccer, you dopes) are pitted against each other. By some freak of fate, I, who am ill-read in contemporary American literature and recent literary bestsellers generally, got USA vs Nigeria, or Toni Morrison’s Home vs. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. I got a little bit overwhelmed real fast but read the two books, marked some passages, made some notes, checked the expected word count for the post about which one I thought won and thanked god that it wasn’t that large a number—description and a little justification and I would be home free. Then, I started looking at some reviews. Afraid, of course, that they would shape my response. What in this process am I not afraid of, though, really? Buying the book, that’s the only thing I feel really confident about. I know where to buy the book and look forward to the process of that. The rest of it is hell: cozy hell with a cat and Polish bison grass vodka, but a middle-grade hell of self-doubt and confusion and feelings nonetheless.
And then I encountered a review of Americanah in the New Inquiry that said many many smart things about the book but also alluded to essential conventionality of a love story plot—a point I myself had made to a friend over dinner the other night while discussing the book. Or rather, I’d said “You know the two main characters are going to end up back together in the end, so it’s just why bother.” That old machinery—so effective, so creaky. When I was a prim little girl, I took it as a personal offense against creativity that all songs were love songs. Couldn’t they write about something else? There were other things in the world, for heaven’s sake! My diaries probably had a lot of “for heaven’s sake” in them. Woe betide the little girl whose vocabulary comes from 1934.
But now I’m turning to consider the question again now, since I never trust anything I read, nor anything I say. Is a love story a failure of the imagination? Is it an essentially bourgeois form? But why should it be a bourgeois form? Because women like it and women are inherently bourgeois? And something something about the novel’s origins in the 18th century and early women readers and marriage as a way to ensure social stability instead of actually satisfying anyone’s desires. Right? Is a love story too insular, too domestic, not engaged enough with the wider world?
Oh bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, I call bullshit on these fears about love and stories about it. It isn’t the only thing in the world and, elevating romantic/sexual love about all other stories distorts human experience greatly and makes us all sad in the night, but the truth is I do believe that a love story is a valid, original story line. Mostly because I think they are about humans coming to understand each other. And if it’s a love story that goes well, humans appreciating each other’s fine qualities.
Why, though, does this still seem unambitious? Is it because we know ourselves too well and know how little there is to know, that a plot based on this idea seems to fall short? Perhaps. Maybe that’s the key. I would like to believe that this isn’t true of myself, that to fall in love with me would be to embark on a long and exciting journey of exploration, rather than a short and very dusty forced hike. The truth is, there’s no way not to struggle, not to be boring, petty, repetitive, lazy. I nearly went crazy last year, lost my way, considered suicide again and again… but those experiences were about emotional poverty and pain, and I don’t want someone to understand them, or me in the midst of them, I want them to be gone. Happy love stories to me are the opposite of depression: outward-facing, healthy, involved, learning things, full of the range of emotion. Depression is adolescent; they are adult.
But there’s only so much distance I can put between myself last year and myself now. Art slicks things up; life’s full of waste. Do they feel too far from life then, love stories, too purposeful, too full of direction? I want to redeem them, but I don’t know how, and instead I put on Sturgill Simpson’s cover of “The Promise,” the finest love song I know. It’s all about fumbled speech and not being one's best self every day, and in it the lover promises that love will develop, some day down the road, if the beloved would just stay around long enough. It’s an unaffected track that reaches a surprising crescendo near the end, when Simpson reaches farther and sings the chorus one extra time, much more desperately than before. Stay around, love, stay around, one day art will transform us both, or has it done so already, right now?
