num_pages: 336
description: 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.
language: English
title: Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions
publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing