THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves, more from Hepola post-Blackout

THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves
SARAH HEPOLA
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of Blackout excavates the romantic entanglements that defined her adulthood—an electrifying and unflinching account of the ways we choose love, it chooses us, and how those choices build a life.

“I’m scared I only want what I can’t have,” I said.

“Oh baby,” he said. “It’s the only thing there is to want.”

Sarah Hepola wanted so much: a big career; travel and adventure; deep relationships; passion. Having realized so many of those desires, she also grieved the ways her life was not what she’d always imagined it would be. Did I want too much, she wondered. Did I make the wrong choices? Love the wrong people?

In The Only Thing There Is To Want, Hepola revisits three complicated love affairs from her past, seeking to understand how they might have kept her from the life she’d envisioned, but also made her who she is. Examining her own decisions, Hepola probes the question: Is love ever really a choice?

This dazzling portrait of the mirages of modern romance captures the paradox of desire: wanting propels us forward and holds us back. Funny, achingly tender, and fearlessly intimate, The Only Thing There Is to Want is about discovering the beauty in the life you’ve built.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Is love ever really a choice?", the synopsis poses.

No.

That's it then, we're done here, no further questions your honor.

You're the same person sober as you are drunk only masking better. Author Hepola is candid about her love for these men being...ill-considered...but without insobriety to blame for them, she sits with the uncomfortable reality that she makes questionable choices. It's a major moment in an adult's life. Face up, take stock, look carefully at what you are actually doing not the story you tell yourself about what you're actually doing...it can never be simple when the subject is as primal as Love. The stories are simple, we need that to make sense of the wildness of Love.

But go into it, make that fearless and searching inventory of you life, the story crumbles and with it the wall between your Self and your illusions, the stories you tell to yourself about yourself. Like the ones about too-young guys who need you, married guys who want you, and remote guys you want.

It's all there, it's all totally relatable, it's not one bit more romanticized or disingenuously justified than anyone else's baggage; it's a good idea, do it in public so you can't hide from the consequences. Someone out there *needs* to read this book, to know they are not alone or even unusual.

Well-aimed at a market that will not shrink any time soon, presented in a very unflattering warts-and-all top light, it is indeed a book many will need. I don't think I'm one of them because I've been in therapy for, like, ever and these are the techniques of being in a theraputic collaboration.

I hope multitudes feel drawn to Author Hepola's story of how Love deceived her, and I don't mean the men she loved I mean the emotion Love...leading her into emotional traps, through strength-sapping swamps of self-pity, through the powerfully seductive pitfalls of main-character syndrome. (It might not be in the DSM yet but it will be.)

Love powers the world, we're told. but no one extends the analogy to how power is made: burning irreplaceable resources and polluting the planet in ever-more toxic ways, or using rare commodities that can fuel your power generation at the cost of massively dangerous leavings that can kill for generations. Only very rarely have people used renewable, ever-cheaper, and limitless ways of making power.

Time to switch to renewables, though at huge cost, for all our power needs. Love perhaps most urgently of all.

SOLSTICE, yet another straight-people-unhappy tale with lovely bits about dance

SOLSTICE
CAROL GILLIGAN
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant but restless dancer discovers the true meaning of love and intimacy through the ebbs and flows of her marriage in this exquisitely written novel—from the bestselling author and psychologist whose feminist classic, In a Different Voice, revolutionized our understanding of women’s lives

Boston, 1969. Eve, a dancer whose feelings are expressed through the body and movement, senses an inexplicable distance growing between herself and her husband, Gabe, a journalist and father of her two children. Feeling lost and alone, she begins an affair; Gabe detects it immediately and begins one himself. Yet somehow they find their way back to each other, and when Eve gives birth to a daughter, their marriage becomes vital again.

Years later, when Gabe returns from a reporting trip to the Middle East and Berlin, Eve again perceives something is wrong in her marriage. Gabe no longer seems like the man she once knew. He has always had a darkness she could not fathom—deep psychological scars from his childhood, when Gabe escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport.

Amsterdam, 1991. Newly separated from Gabe, Eve has accepted a fellowship to choreograph a dance inspired by the story of Adam and Eve. When a colleague introduces her to a new translation of the ancient text, Eve begins to redefine the way she thinks about women, men, and relationships—and, perhaps, to see another path back to her marriage.

In this emotionally riveting novel, Carol Gilligan draws on her unsurpassed psychological understanding of women's lives to explore a new vision of love and intimacy. Sweeping across decades and continents, attuned to the rhythms of life and time, Solstice is a provocative and profound portrait of what it takes to truly love another.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Plenty of buzz around this tale of a Holocaust survivor haunted by his myriad ghosts, the burgeoning dancer/life force he marries, the challenging marriage they undertake, and lots of Jewish history relevant to the present day.

My interest in straight peoples' intimacy is not large enough to support this latter aspect of the story as my focus. I was a great deal more interested in Eve's story of how dance could explain the myth of Adam and Eve. It was *wonderful* to read Author Gilligan's evocations of dance as an art form. Eve's learning of the deeper meanings, the cultural resonances, the eternal quality of myths with a rabbi's learnèd guidance after she splits from Gabe in 1991 was as involving as anything I've read this year.

It's mired in a relationship novel I don't care about, one that's intended to add another resonant frequency to the myth of Adam and Eve, but that ends up not doing that. If I was supposed to care about Eve and Gabe as a couple, why is Gabe so...amorphous? Their three kids are names, when every couple I have ever known (that has kids) honestly thinks and talks more about their kids than anything else.

Author Gilligan's a psychologist so these are clearly informed choices made with intent, not lacunae of understanding. As they did not make sense to me, I can't say her information came through to me in the novel she wrote. I'll forget these characters in a week, but will carry the passages describing dance with me.