The Situation
Writing about a book about a subject as comprehensive and nebulous as love requires a commitment exponentially greater than writing a precisely outlined murder mystery or fantasy novel. Just the very question “what is love” is enough to fill an entire volume. Therefore, it only stands to reason that the stimulus for such a daunting undertaking can be directly traced to a particular situation in which an author finds herself:
“Grief and sadness overwhelmed me. I did not know what I had done wrong… For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future…I awakened from my trance state and was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness had become the order of the day. I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood.”
Shame
The author turns to writers Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael for what may not be the last word on shame, but what is most definitely some of the strongest use of imagery in the book. Shame may seem like a strange concept to focus upon in a book that the title professes to be all about love, but the imagery reveals how shame is an integral aspect of self-love:
“Shame is the most disturbing emotion we ever experience directly about ourselves, for in the moment of shame we feel deeply divided from ourselves. Shame is like a wound made by an unseen hand, in response to defeat, failure or rejection. At the same moment that we feel most disconnected, we long to embrace ourselves once more, to feel reunited. Shame divides us from ourselves, just as it divides us from others, and because we still yearn for reunion, shame is deeply disturbing.”
Venus and Mars
John Gray published an absurdly influential book about male/female relationships in 1992 titled Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus. Almost twenty years earlier Paul McCartney and Wings released an album titled Venus and Mars which covered pretty much the same territory; an under-appreciated concept album about male/female relationships in all its many configurations. A decade Gray's book, the concept was still going strong as useful imagery to define gender divergence:
“In the Mars-and-Venus-gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not love that is the order of the day. The privilege of power is at the heart of patriarchal thinking. Girls and boys, women and men who have been taught to think this way almost always believe love is not important, or if it is, it is never as important as being powerful, dominant, in control, on top—being right.”
Getting Personal
With the obvious exception of the “love is” sort of imagery, the single most dominant recurrence of imagery in the book is intensely personal. The author is bravely unafraid of metaphorically stripping down and revealing both the beauty and the ugliness of her own personal experiences with love. The book is populated with abundance references to partners in love in all the myriad forms love takes:
“The two most intense partnerships of my life were both with men who are adult children of alcoholic fathers. Neither has memories of interacting positively with his father. Both were raised by divorced working mothers who never married again. They were similar in temperament to my dad: quiet, hardworking, and emotionally withholding. I can remember when I took the first man home. My sisters were shocked that he was, in their eyes, `so much like Daddy’ and `you’ve always hated Daddy.’”
