How to fall in love with anyone : a memoir in essays /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017Copyright date: 2017Edition: First Simon & Schuster hardcover editionDescription: ix, 238 pages ; 22 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781501137440
- 1501137441
- 306.82 23
- HQ801 .C3426 2017
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Biography | Hayden Library | Book | CATRON-CATRON (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610021030981 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
An insightful, charming, and absolutely fascinating memoir from the author of the popular New York Times essay, "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This," (one of the top five most popular New York Times pieces of 2015) explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy.
What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.
In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists' research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she'd read about--where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions--and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.
In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-238).
Introduction -- The exploded star: the myth of the right person -- The football coach and the cheerleader: what makes a good love story? -- Coal miner's daughter: love in context -- Girl meets boy: following love's script -- The problem of deservingness: our American obsession with Cinderella -- The black box: thoughts on the stories we don't tell -- I'm willing to lie about how we met: the tyranny of meeting cute -- Okay, honey: bad advice from good people -- If you can fall in love with anyone, how do you choose? -- The pleasures of ordinary devotion -- To fall in love with anyone, do this -- Arthur Aron's 36 questions.
In a series of candid essays, Mandy Len Catron takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world. -- Adapted from publisher's summary.
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Introduction (p. 1)
- The exploded star: the myth of the right person (p. 5)
- The football coach and the cheerleader: what makes a good love story? (p. 25)
- Coal miner's daughter: Love in context (p. 53)
- Girl meets boy: following love's script (p. 75)
- The problem of deservingness: our american obsession with Cinderella (p. 93)
- The black box: thoughts on the stories we don't tell (p. 119)
- I'm willing to lie about how we met: the tyranny of meeting cute (p. 139)
- Okay, honey: bad advice from good people (p. 153)
- If you can fall in love with anyone, how do you choose? (p. 169)
- The pleasures of ordinary devotion (p. 193)
- To fall in love with anyone, do this (p. 217)
- Arthur aron's 36 questions (p. 223)
- Acknowledgments (p. 227)
- Notes (p. 231)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Booklist Review
In 2015, Catron wrote an essay in the New York Times that became one of the paper's most popular of the year, about a psychologist's set of 36 questions purported to make strangers fall in love. The title of Catron's first book, a memoir in essays, is a bit misleading, since it's less about the questions and more about the author's experiences falling in and out of love. Catron spent 10 years trying to love a man who just wasn't right. Her picture-perfect parents decided to get divorced after many years of happy marriage. What was happening? What is the nature of love? How do we find love, and how do we keep it? Catron set out on a quest to find the answers to these universal questions. Along the way, she tries out the 36 questions, and yes, she does fall in love. Honest and well-researched, the book will teach readers plenty about love, science, and themselves. Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us.--Brock, Emily Copyright 2017 BooklistKirkus Book Review
One woman ponders what it means to be in love.When Catron's parents got divorced after three decades of marriage, the event caused her to take a closer look at her own faltering relationship, which had continued for almost 10 years. When she first got together with Kevin, life had stretched ahead of them with infinite possibilities, but after so much time as a couple, she wondered if she had settled for a life and a person that were not quite right for her. "It had never occurred to me," writes the author, "that you could love someone the way I loved Kevinthat you could want to wake up with him every morning and go to bed with him every nightbut not know if you wanted to commit the rest of your life to him." Their breakup was slow and fitful, but eventually they parted ways, leaving the door open for new relationships and questions about what it means to fall in or be in love. Catron uses her own romantic relationships and the marriages of her parents, grandparents, sister, and friends to question how and why we fall in love, what it means to share a life with someone without tying the knot, and how we use our relationships to show a certain side of ourselves to the world. Catron touches on a variety of disciplines, including history, psychology, literature, music, movies, and human biology, showing readers how love consists of numerous choices that influence us and help us overlook the small details about a person that become irksome. The author also includes her original essay on love, which was one of the most popular in 2015 in the New York Times, as well as 36 questions to ask a potential partner. Personal musings and reminiscences paired with solid research provide an interesting stroll through an abstract topic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Originally from Appalachian Virginia, Mandy Len Catron now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in the The New York Times, The Walrus, and The Rumpus as well as literary journals and anthologies. She writes about love and love stories at The Love Story Project (TheLoveStoryProject.ca). She teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her article "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This" was one of the most popular articles published by The New York Times in 2015. How to Fall in Love with Anyone is her first book.There are no comments on this title.