Conversations on Love
Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings
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4.3 • 16 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An investigation of love in all its forms, featuring conversations with Lisa Taddeo, Esther Perel, Emily Nagoski, Kate Bowler, Alain de Botton, Stephen Grosz, Roxane Gay and others
Journalist Natasha Lunn was almost 30 when she realized that there was no map for understanding love. While she was used to watching friends fall in and out of love, the older she got the more she had to acknowledge: her friends' relationship struggles could no longer be chalked up to youth, and the more she learned about her parents, grandparents, work colleagues, and mentors the clearer it became that age had not brought any of them any closer to understanding this elusive, transformative, consuming emotion. One night during the months she found this realization settling over her, she sat up in bed and jotted three words in a notebook: conversations on love. In that moment, Lunn understood that she didn't want advice about love, she wasn't looking for the answers, or evergreen wisdom but she craved candid, wide-ranging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the parts of love that often don't make it into our everyday discussions of marriage, sibling relationships, friendships, or mother/daughter bonds. Conversations on Love started as an experiment aimed at interviewing experts about what love meant to them, in all of it's messiness, and quickly blossomed into a newsletter that attracted thousands of subscribers and a prestigious range of interviewees. It turns out that Lunn wasn't the only person ready to talk more openly and expansively about love.
Interweaving personal essays and revealing interviews with some of the most sough-after experts on love, journalist Natasha Lunn guides us through the paradoxical heart of three key questions about love--How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?--to deliver a book that is a solace, a beacon, a call to arms, a tool-kit. The real-life love stories in these pages will leave you hopeful and validated, while the insights from experts will transform the way you think about your relationships. Above all, Conversations on Love will remind you what love is: fragile, sturdy, mundane, beautiful, always worth fighting for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British journalist Lunn gets to the heart of love's complexities and rewards in her thought-provoking and heartfelt debut. "Although love is in many ways unknowable," she writes, "it is useful for us to try to define it." What follows is an enriching series of interviews with writers and thinkers (plucked from the author's newsletter of the same name) blended with moving personal stories from Lunn's own life. Believing love begins within oneself, philosopher Alain de Botton maintains "the capacity to say, ‘I could be alone,' is strangely one of the most important guarantees of one day being with somebody else in a happy way." Roxane Gay, in sharing how she's sustained romance with her long-term partner, Debbie Millman, emphasizes the importance of "recognizing that new isn't always better." Meanwhile, relationship therapist Esther Perel recommends committed couples conduct "a little annual summit" to keep things in check. Mining the heartbreak of a miscarriage Lunn suffered before having her daughter, she considers how loss can deepen one's ability to love: "the uncertainty love requires is not a problem... it is what makes it beautiful." While Lunn's subject matter is famously known to inspire clichés, these insightful conversations resist that impulse with their rawness and wry wisdom. Cynics and romantics alike will find lots to ponder.
