Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

by Briallen Hopper

Overview

A sharp and entertaining essay collection about the importance of multiple forms of love and friendship in a world designed for couples, from a laser-precise new voice.

Sometimes it seems like there are two American creeds, self-reliance and marriage, and neither of them is mine. I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others' love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers.

Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honors the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary—friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back. She draws from personal experience, sharing stories about her loving but combative family, the fiercely independent Emerson scholar who pushed her away, and the friends who have become her invented or found family; pop culture touchstones like the Women's March, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and the timeless series Cheers; and the work of writers like Joan Didion, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O'Connor, and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick like you've never seen it!).

Hard to Love pays homage and attention to unlikely friends and lovers both real and fictional. It is a series of love letters to the meaningful, if underappreciated, forms of intimacy and community that are tricky, tangled, and tough, but ultimately sustaining.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632868800
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	02/05/2019
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	807,801
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Briallen Hopper writes about pop culture, religion, politics, friends, family, and herself for New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, the New Inquiry, Avidly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Killing the Buddha, among many others. Her essays have been cited or recommended by sources like the New York Times, the Rumpus, Flavorwire, Longreads.com, and Slate. She has a PhD in American literature from Princeton and teaches writing at Yale.

www.briallenhopper.com
@briallenhopper briallenhopper.tumblr.com

Editorial Reviews

07/23/2018
Hopper debuts with a smart group of essays on contemporary relationships. A literature scholar, Hopper cultivates a voice that is sophisticated and analytical, but also earnest and eager, and her strongest essays balance these qualities. In “Spinsters,” her treatise on female friendship, she shares fond memories from her life, such as of falling asleep to a friend’s voice on the phone, while decrying how the “arbitrary conflation of marriage with the commitments and responsibilities of adult life sometimes turns unmarried people into second-class citizens, while devaluing many necessary kinds of love.” Hopper also skillfully uses personal anecdote in a piece on how caring for a friend with cancer is both “the most adult thing... and the most adolescent thing,” because it requires negotiating health insurance policies, but also “willful wish-fulfillment” in the periods between treatments. Only rarely is she less successful, as in a disappointingly banal piece on “How to Be Single.” Much more often, she demonstrates how being deeply personal with the people in one’s life can help one to be critically engaged. “I think about writing and hoarding together,” she says, after describing the hoarders in her family, in that “so much has to be serendipitously discovered and rediscovered and collected and stored.” There is some to be passed over in these essays, but there is much more to be discovered. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Extraordinary. I'll return to this book over and over during the years to come: for its gifts of insight and delight, for the primal and powerful gift of its company.” —Leslie Jamison, author of THE EMPATHY EXAMS and THE RECOVERING

“An exceptional work: an expert tangle of memoir, literary criticism, pop cultural analysis and political meditation that is warm, buoyant, connective, and smart as hell.” —Rebecca Traister, author of ALL THE SINGLE LADIES and GOOD AND MAD

"In her rousing essay collection Hard To Love, Hopper takes us into her unusually expansive love life, complete with knotty familial relationships, deep friendships, and emotional investment in the fictional and material worlds . . . Daring . . . brilliant . . . ingenious." - NPR.org

"An incredibly thoughtful examination of the various ways we depend upon others, through an expansive and engaging look at love outside a traditional romantic sphere . . . Hopper’s ability to reimagine and celebrate the ties that bind us are something to celebrate." - The New York Observer

“In a society that often values romantic love above all else, nothing is as invigorating as a strong feminist accounting of the different roles women assume throughout life. Hopper discusses an Emersonian boyfriend; spinsters past and present; being and not being a mother; and the power of friendship.” —Ms. Magazine

“Stunning . . . Prepare to underline vigorously, nod along, and ultimately call your friend to say, 'Thanks.'” —Refinery 29

“The perfect book to give to a friend and read together.” —Nylon

“I found myself deeply comforted by Hard to Love. Hopper lets us know: We are not alone in the universe after all.” —Jami Attenberg, author of ALL GROWN UP

“Hopper's essays seem like love songs . . . delicate, thoughtful elegies to friendship, compassion, and grace. A fresh, well-crafted collection.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“I adored Hard To Love and its miraculous intermingling of revelatory criticism and soulful memoir. In its excesses of tenderness, intelligence, and pleasure, this book brilliantly puts the lie to the idea that a single life is less full—or less complicated—than a coupled one.” —Alice Bolin, author of DEAD GIRLS

“The best essay collection I've read in ages. Hopper's rare gifts of intellectual rigor, spiritual depth, and genuine curiosity make her a must-read voice on everything she turns her brilliant mind to. She's earned a place as the poet laureate of single womanhood.” —Ada Calhoun, author of WEDDING TOASTS I'LL NEVER GIVE

“In deft strokes, Hopper reminds us that death-do-us-part romance is not the only way to love, or to live. A satisfying, eye-opening examination.” —Esmé Weijun Wang, author of THE COLLECTED SCHIZOPHRENIAS

“Our culture often tells us we have two options: coupled and loved, or alone and unloved. Hopper posits a third option: uncoupled but very much loved and loving. These essays refute our binary assumptions by teasing out the satisfying complexities that lie between and beyond the old poles.” —Anne Fadiman, author of THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER and THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN

“With intrepid imagination, Hopper conjures a world beyond our most imperious cultural assumptions. Read this book.” —Gregory Pardlo, author of AIR TRAFFIC

“A compelling, smart collection of essays on relationships of many kinds—hoarding, dependence, female friendship, marriage or lack thereof—from a widely published literary scholar.” —LitHub

“A smart group of essays on contemporary relationships. A literature scholar, Hopper cultivates a voice that is sophisticated and analytical, but also earnest and eager, and her strongest essays balance these qualities.” —Publishers Weekly

“Smart and studied reflections on the power of friendship . . . While families are bound by blood and couples often by the law of marriage, the bonds of friendship expand and contract over time. Hopper fervently embraces this and the rich intimacies it affords.” —Booklist

“A refreshing collection that probes the expanse of the human heart.” —BookPage

From the Publisher

★ 2018-10-08

Love and yearning, independence and community recur as salient themes in this debut collection.

In her first book, Hopper (English/Yale Univ.), a contributor to New York magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications, gathers essays notable for their intimacy and warmth. Raised in an evangelical family by "anxious, God-obsessed parents," the author and her siblings were home-schooled, with little exposure to TV, movies, and radio. "We shared a unique set of cultural references," she writes, "or perhaps a unique lack of them, which amounted to a secret language." In high school, she began boning up on popular culture and, gradually, assembling a "found family": people who "know you and love you for who you are—not for who you once were, or who you never were." Many essays meditate on varieties of sentimental attachments—to friends, lovers, and, in "Hoarding," to things. Hopper rejects the idea of a "hoarding disorder," which "pathologizes an entire deep-rooted orientation toward the material world, an orientation that constitutes my lifelong experiences of creativity, attachment, safety, and joy." Both hoarding and writing, she suggests, depend on what is "serendipitously discovered and rediscovered and collected and stored." In the lovely "Lean On," Hopper regrets that dependence is "despised in our culture, from psychology to politics," implying weakness and shame. Self-reliance, on the other hand, is extolled by Emerson, Joan Didion, Ayn Rand, noir novels, and most Westerns. Hopper begs to differ, celebrating the gifts of "shared daily life." Praise for community underscores her admiration for the classic sitcom Cheers, whose theme song, "Where Everybody Knows Your Name," seems to her "a kind of love song." Whether she is writing about her fraught decision to become pregnant with donated sperm, a friend's bout with cancer, baking ("a code for conveying care safely without the ambiguity of words"), the collective energy of the Women's March, or a visit to the Foundling Museum, Hopper's essays seem like love songs, as well: delicate, thoughtful elegies to friendship, compassion, and grace.

A fresh, well-crafted collection.

Kirkus Reviews