Love Begets Love: A Guest Post by Jessica Soffer
A novel about marriage, parenthood, life and death, This Is a Love Story is a timeless exploration of family and a glittering ode to New York City. Read on for an exclusive essay from B&N Book Club author Jessica Soffer on writing This Is a Love Story.
Hardcover $29.00
This Is a Love Story (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
This Is a Love Story (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
In Stock Online
Hardcover $29.00
An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both.
An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both.
I started writing THIS IS A LOVE STORY nearly six years ago. For a long time, I worked with just two main characters: Jane and Abe, an artist and a writer, who meet and fall in love when they are young and remain together—building their careers, becoming parents, moving from the city to the country—over the course of fifty years.
For a long time, the manuscript was told strictly from Abe’s perspective. It was his story of loss and love and remembering. It was short and small, tight.
Then, I put the manuscript in a drawer. I was pregnant with my first child, and I had a funny feeling about writing when I was carrying her. Like, all the anxiety of making something work might transfer: the disappointment, the deep, deep doubt.
Our daughter was born a couple of months before lockdown, and I did not write for a year.
When I came back to the manuscript, I was thrilled to find that I still liked the story and what it was trying to say. That doesn’t always happen! It still spoke to me—and in a different way. And so, I kept on. Eventually, a friend who is a very wonderful reader read it and said, I like this, but it feels like only part of the love story.
That comment opened everything up for me.
After that, I began thinking about a love story in a wider way. Every one, I think, exists in relation to other loves, other narratives. Every love becomes exactly itself because of the support, the complication, the challenge of other relationships. No love is an island, right? Nothing in a vacuum.
Soon, with an alacrity that was surprising even to me, all the novel’s other characters were born: Abe and Jane’s son, the woman who nearly breaks their marriage, Central Park. Jane didn’t have her own voice before but then she did. She talked about postpartum and creativity, how they lived inside of their marriage, changed everything.
There were other characters, too, that popped up. A grandmother, a friend, a colleague. They were mentioned previously but they became critical. Soon, there was the love of things as much as people, too: art, New York City, a home by the water.
Love begets love, in life, but on the page too. I found that the more I wrote about love, the more love was generated. What a gift to watch a story expand in this way. But any love is all risk, too. And yet, maybe that’s the best part. Or at least the part worth reading for. At least for me. Hoping you find your favorite parts, too.
Photo credit: Sasha Israel