From Babble With Love

Words by Megan Thomas

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. It’s a bit of a strange day, which leaves those without romantic prospects feeling rubbish and those with romantic prospects wondering if they can get away with celebrating a week later when the chocolates cost normal prices again. But putting the commercial aspects of Valentine’s Day aside, a day which celebrates love - in all its forms - is something we can get behind. We love love. You should spend today celebrating love in all its forms, and here are some books to help you do that. 

1. Uncoupling by Lorraine Brown

Next week Thursday, we’ll be publishing our latest Babble interview with author Lorraine Brown. She spent her childhood feigning doing her homework while actually tucking into the Sweet Dreams teen romance series by Janet Quin-Harkin, so it’s only fitting that her debut novel is a modern romance set in the “city of love”, Paris. 

Uncoupling tells the story of a young woman on a train to Amsterdam - except she doesn’t realise that there are two sections of the train, one of which goes to Paris when the train uncouples. Naturally, she ends up on the section headed to Paris without her partner, who’s cruising along to Amsterdam. But when she meets a young, rude-but-not-actually-rude Parisian who has made the same mistake as her, she can’t resist a tour of the city he calls home before the next train to Amsterdam.

Our protagonist has spent years contorting herself to match the person she thinks she should be, denying herself her dreams and passions for fear of failure and due to a total lack of self-confidence, and so while Uncoupling tells a story of romantic love, it is also a reminder to love yourself and to believe in your abilities. The rest will follow.

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2. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

At its core, Everything I Know About Love is Dolly Alderton’s love letter to her friends, and a reminder that the love shared between friends is so powerful: the kind that stays true even if romantic love fails us. 

It’s a memoir which tells of her experiences of love and the perceptions she has had of love at various stages in her life, including when she was a dating columnist for The Sunday Times in her 20’s. From the hopeless teenage crushes to the age of internet dating, Dolly realised going into her 30’s that the only constant throughout was a deep love for her friends, particularly female friendship, and the sisterhood that has afforded her. 

However, if you’d prefer to focus on romantic love (of the disastrous variety), Dolly’s fiction debut Ghosts will haunt you with the realities of online dating, while also reminding you that real, uncomplicated love comes from many places. It also offers a touching account of parental love, and the experience of watching someone you love suffer.

3. How To Carry Fire by Christina Thatcher

Babbler Christina Thatcher’s poetry anthology, How To Carry Fire, is a powerful exploration of many different types of love. How To Carry Fire is a triumphant crescendo of the fiery intensity of “unconditional” love, which is poetically explored through coming to terms with the death of her father, whose troubled life tested the elasticity of familial love. It explores marital love, with poems like “Husband, When You Go” and “On Our Friends’ Divorce” displaying love’s complexity and depth, and the heart-warming “Knowing You” and “How To Love A Gardener”. It also deals with the love which Christina has developed for her new home in Cardiff, Wales. Ultimately, to call Christina’s work a book of love poems would be entirely accurate, but not in the way that you might have imagined.

4. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Oh, but who doesn’t love a story which erodes the line between “love” and “obsession”? This is where it becomes really important to acknowledge that Wuthering Heights can be a “love story” (it’s considered one of the Great Victorian Romance), but not a romantic story. Or at least, we’ve got to nod towards the fact that digging up your lover’s grave and/or haunting them after your death is a very specific type of gothic romance. That said, while Wuthering Heights isn’t necessarily the most relatable portrayal of love, there’s something to be said for how it honestly deals with the multiplicity of the emotion: as something that can exist where it shouldn’t, in spite of one’s better judgement, and in a selfish, ultimately destructive way.

5. Live A Little by Howard Jacobson

Live A Little tells the story of two stubborn, arguably dislikable people falling madly in love… in their 90’s. In the 90 years before Shimi and Beryl met, they lived lives of varying degrees of adventure, guilt and shame, and yet in the frailty of their remaining years they are able to find something that resembles love.

Beryl stitches tapestries of morbid jokes and gives her carers grief, grasping at anecdotes from her life as they slip from her head with increasing speed. Shimi’s walking routes centre around the public toilets for his weakening bladder, and he reads cartomancy cards at the Chinese restaurant he lives above, desperately trying to forget the sins of his past in spite of his uncharacteristically impeccable memory. All the while, Howard Jacobson is stitching tapestries of love at least glamorous but most real.

6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

We’ll finish off this round-up with a very powerful love which has unbelievably far-reaching, sturdy boundaries: sibling love. It’s a confusing kind of love, especially when you consider parental love and the level to which your siblings can drive you mad, but it is unwavering. Sharing a childhood with someone creates a crazy-powerful bond, as does having a relationship to which you can return no matter what. Little Women might have other things going on like a civil war, useless husbands, babies and some of the most bloodthirsty sisterly fights in literature, but the March sisters’ unquestionable devotion for one another is the real deal.