Holiday Read No. 5: In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, by Amy Bloom

'it was terrible but not traumatic.'

I discovered Amy Bloom's collection of short stories in 1998, when I was working in New World Bookshop, in Clifton. I worked Fridays evenings and Saturdays from October 1998 through the summer of 2000, then again before I went to Prague. And after, when I came back. The bookshop and I were b'shert, meant to be. It was - quite literally - written in the stars, according to the shop's owner, who was an astrologer.

This book is different to _Come to Me_, to _Love Invents Us_, to _A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You_, of course.it isn't fiction.  And yet, it is the same: searing, salty, with space to tear up and laugh easily. I haven't read her most recent book; life got in the way and I read other things and now I return to her words, flinty, warm  with a hard crust, like a good sourdough. Comforting, like a favourite mug of tea. 

*'He said, I'm not stupid. I know how this will end. You'll tell me we should not do this to the people we love, or I'll tell you and we'll go back to our lives where we should be. And I will never get over this. Or we'll blow up our lives and be together.

'I just want to say this, he said, before we walk back to our cars. I know who you could be with. Someone rich, someone fancy, some guy your sister finds for you.  But I know who you should be with. You should be with the a guy who doesn't mind that you're smarter than he is, who doesn't mind that most of the times you'll be the main event. You need to be with a guy who supports how hard you work and who'll bring you a cup of coffee late at night. I don't know if I can be that guy, he said, tears in his eyes, but I'd like a shot.

We married.'

*'As my old man used to say, frequently, regarding my expectations: the triumph of hope over experience.'

Early in May, the twenty-one gun salute at my father's funeral still echoing in my era

I was driving to London with my son on a Thursday, listening to the World Service.  Bloom was being interviewed about this memoir, about the experience of watching someone disintegrate, of helping them carry out their final wishes. It hits me that I don't have anyone to do that for, or to do it for me, in that way. That I have not ever had access to that kind of love. And I am awash with self pity and envy over her grief. Then relieved, then ashamed,  baffled. I love in fear of wasting away, with no one to help inact an exit strategy, if needed.  Even if I were still married, I know I wouldn't have had that. We had simply ceased to have one another's back in that way. 

The last time I thought I was on the verge of being in love, it turned out the man was a villan pretending to be a good guy, a coward in wolf's clothing.  It hurt and I allowed that hurt to preoccupy and distract me from so much.  I don't regret it, though there is a part of me that wishes I could move to the corner of Regret and Resentment and turn into a variation of  'The Scream.' I want to be ready to open to this kind of love, this devotion. I want to be irritated by the little things, want someone to slap my ass as I walk past to 

I pick up the book two weeks before my trip to Italy. I pick it up and put it down.  I pack it, unpack it, repack it. 

I begin read the book on fits and starts. Input it down to think about the research I had started to do in late 2020, when I knew in my bones that my dad was going to go out big.  And then it clicks, that way it does when you KNOW you were meant to read this book, hold this hand, leave this job, kiss this mouth.  I start it over the day after I scatter the first round of my parents ashes. It hurts, holding it. My friend A looks at me with concern. 'Am I going to have to take the book away from you?'

* 'It will turn out that these two doctors are for me the villains of the story. When I write fiction, there is almost always no villian at all.  There are occasionally cruel fathers, often redeemed in the end by one great, embarrassing love affair or revealed to have a streak, however narrow of compassion or decency.  There are plenty of faithless wives in my fiction, but if you're read carefully they are rarely villians, being married as they are to deeply disappointing men.'

The decline is so intense, it sears. It makes me wonder how I could have missed it in my own father. It terrifies me because what if something similar is my own fate?

There is more, so much more. I cry as I finish it, having finally boarded my flight back to London, onto whatever comes next.