Staff Pick
What begins as an experiment for the author, who takes a psychology test to try and fall in love with another test participant, becomes the premise for a book that is as much fun to read as it sounds. Catron supplies a candid account of her doubts and misgivings about love, drawing from her family's and her own romantic history, tackling the topic with analytical curiosity. And when she finally does arrive at success in love, as the title implies, it's not under any fairy tale spell but as the natural progression of events by being open and willing to explore what it means to love. Recommended By Aubrey W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"In our age of total romantic confusion, Mandy Len Catron is a voice of good sense, warm humor and consoling wisdom. Through the lens of her own relationships, she teaches us — with a deft, convincing intelligence — some of the vital moves in the art of love." Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Course of Love
Review
"Personal musings and reminiscences paired with solid research provide an interesting stroll through an abstract topic." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Originally from Appalachian Virginia, Mandy Len Catron is a writer living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. She’s writing 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.
Mandy Len Catron on PowellsBooks.Blog
I tell my students that an essay, in the classic sense of the word, is really an exercise — something you do, not something you produce. It’s related to the word assay, meaning “to try.” And maybe this is what makes the form particularly well suited to writing about love. In essays, as in love, the interesting part is the trying...
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