This Is a Love Story

Jessica Soffer is an American author who grew up in New York City and lives in Sag Harbor, New York. Soffer attended Connecticut College, where she met her husband and currently teaches creative writing. She also leads small writing groups in her local community.

Soffer’s personal life features heavily in her short stories, personal essays, and her two novels, There Will Be Apricots (2013) and This Is a Love Story (2025). In her New York Times op-ed article, Soffer explains that There Will Be Apricots “is about food: an old woman and a young girl find solace in the kitchen and in each other” and is loosely inspired by Soffer’s own connection to eating and her mother (Soffer, Jessica. “Real Moms Don’t Cook.” The New York Times, 11 May 2013). Soffer expounds upon her relationship with food in the article, describing how she translated her mother’s atypical cooking habits into literature—a facet of her personal history that inspired her reflections on the relationship between love and food. Portions of There Will Be Apricots also recall Soffer’s Iraqi background: Her father’s family is from Iraq, and Soffer remembers her aunt making “long-simmering things, Iraqi stews and pastries laced with cardamom and cinnamon and cloves” (Soffer).

Soffer continues to draw from her personal life in This Is a Love Story. In particular, these parallels include her longtime relationship with New York City (and specifically Central Park), her father’s illness (explored through Jane’s illness), her experience buying property on Long Island and moving out of the city (conveyed via Abe and Jane’s move from Manhattan to Orient), and the seasons of her relationship with her husband (represented through Abe’s, Jane’s, and Max’s intimate connections). In the novel, Jane also has Iraqi heritage, and her mother immigrated to the US from Baghdad. Jane’s storyline is thus a gesture to Soffer’s family history.

Outside of her novels, Soffer’s fiction and nonfiction writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Saveur, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue. Her standalone pieces include reflections on marriage, food, writing, and the years she spent living in Costa Rica. Her short story “Beginning, End” appeared in Granta in 2009 and contains formal and narrative echoes of Abe’s sections of This Is a Love Story. “Beginning, End” is also written from the first-person point of view in direct address and traces the evolution of a couple’s relationship over time. References to marriage, illness, affairs, geographical relocations, and remembrance feature heavily in both the short story and Abe’s chapters of This Is a Love Story.

Soffer’s fiction publications can be categorized as literary fiction; unlike genre fiction, works of literary fiction like Soffer’s prioritize character exploration and formal play over plot. This is particularly true of This Is a Love Story, which toys with conventional notions of structure, action, and language throughout. Soffer’s novels are in conversation with other works of literary fiction, including Elizabeth Strout’s 2021 novel Oh, William, Avni Doshi’s 2019 novel Burnt Sugar, and Jenny Jackson’s 2023 novel Pineapple Street. Soffer’s work also makes stylistic allusions to Lorrie Moore (“How to Become a Writer,” A Gate at the Stairs), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, Tom Lake), and George Perec.