Review: Love Stories

Love Stories by Trent Dalton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

There's a sign resting against my desk: 'Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?' 

Feeling the need to reconnect after the Australian Covid lock-downs, Trent Dalton spent two months listening, connecting, and collecting stories from people of all walks of life about their thoughts on love. I went into this thinking that it would be more of an anthology like set-up, a bunch of individual short stories. While the short story outline was there, it was more of a relaying of the author's conversation with the person/people telling their love story. This worked to string and connect the stories but I thought it interjected the author too much into the speakers' stories, I wanted more from the teller's point-of-view. 

Some twenty-five thousand volunteers rolled up their sleeves, got themselves covered in mud and grit and grime, and earned themselves a name that will be whispered and toasted and remembered in the corners of riverside Brisbane bars and restaurants for decades to come: the Mud Army. 

She'd been a Brisbane resident for precisely three days, and she still decided to enlist. And she doesn't know how to explain it, but something changed inside her during that long, hard, beautiful weekend she spent in the hallowed ranks of the Mud Army. She had been feeling a little broken herself, a little bit broken like this city. 'Then I watched this place being rebuilt and it felt like I was being rebuilt with it,' she says. 'That's how it saved me. That's why I love this city.' 

Romantic love often sits center stage when discussing love connections and I enjoyed how familial, friendship, grief, wrong, not enough, inanimate, tough, ambiguous, dangerous, and with yourself love was all discussed, with romantic. The different dynamics, outcomes, and how it changed the person was clear from the conversations and did help to feel a connection to the people sharing their stories. There was a story that the author broke up into two parts, one in the beginning and then end, to give a kind of cliff-hanger and I thought it was a bit ill judged because of the alluding to possible violence, it gave, for me, an almost sensationalized feeling. 

The stories ran the gamut of emotional, funny, and sad, giving this a nice coffee table, decorative bookshelf placement for a random pick-up and indulge in one story at a time. There's a little more of the author in this than I had anticipated and I would have liked for the stories to have been less presented conversational but there were definitely nuggets of keep with you moments. My favorite came from a long-time married couple: 

Rosie smiles, understandingly, then sums her husband up in three words. 'Seamus is truth,' she says. 'Love is the privilege of being with someone long enough that you're gradually refining the truths that you tell each other. You feel safe enough to keep showing more and more of yourself to each other. To me, that's what love is. It's not the fireworks and the rainbows and the butterflies. We all keep pieces to ourselves. True love is showing up as yourself.' 

And now I know what love is: 

Love is exposing all the pieces.

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