47 pages • 1-hour read
This Is a Love Story
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Themes
The Role of Art in Shaping Identity
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, illness, mental illness, and pregnancy loss.
One of This Is a Love Story’s primary themes is the role that artistic creation plays in the individual’s evolving sense of self. The novel explores this theme within the context of Abe’s, Jane’s, and Alice’s storylines. Each of these characters identifies as an artist—be it through writing, painting, or sculpting—but they all have distinct relationships with their creative practices. Abe “never imagined writing full time, it was a cherished hobby, a tic even” (12), but when he and Jane fell in love, Jane’s passion for art inspired his newfound devotion to his craft. Over time, Abe began to see his authorial work as his meaning and purpose in life. In writing fiction, he was able to process the world and understand himself. In contrast, Jane’s relationship with her art—drawing, painting, and sculpting—has always been simple, “[a] one-to-one” (21). Art is inextricable from her identity because in creating, she is reifying her experience of the world. Jane has a keen sense of observation and consistently puts her art before her other relationships and desires. Art gives her complex internal world and fraught past experiences new depth, shape, and significance, clarifying and shaping her identity for her.
Alice’s relationship with art offers a contrasting iteration of how the act of creation might affect the way an individual sees oneself. Alice falls in love with the art of fiction when she reads Abe’s work and begins studying with him in college. She cherishes writing because it makes her feel smart, complicated, and worthy of love. In addition, in writing, she finds a way to express her longing. However, after Abe pushes her away, she begins to wonder, “[W]hich came first? Character or the invention of character?” (112). She is unsure if she only loved writing because she thought she loved Abe or if she loved Abe because she loved writing. She also questions whether these loves are true expressions of herself. Losing Abe causes her to lose her relationship with writing and artistic creation—an internal crisis that shapes her identity by complicating the way she moves through the world and the life she ends up making for herself.
Ultimately, Abe, Jane, and Alice discover that although art infuses their lives with meaning, it cannot ultimately fulfill their every desire and need. Artistic creation offers them the opportunity to discover themselves through acts of observation and written or visual translation, but it can’t supplant other forms of connection or experience. The novel thus suggests that art may be helpful in exploring one’s identity, but it can’t be one’s sole source of meaning.
Memory as a Form of Intimacy and Connection
The novel explores how memory can help the individual form intimate connections through Abe’s chapters. Soffer presents Abe’s first-person sections in a series of fragments that are dictated by his and Jane’s ongoing act of remembrance. In the narrative present, the couple is physically situated in Jane’s room; Abe is typing up anecdotes from their lives together while he and Jane recount significant moments in their lives as a couple and as individuals. This pastime of protracted remembrance offers the couple a way to process their sorrows and joys, to make amends, and ultimately to memorialize the love they’ve fostered and shared over time.
Soffer renders Abe and Jane’s ongoing string of shared memories through figurative language and formal invention, literary techniques that affect the portrayal of the nostalgia that the characters are experiencing. Because Jane is sick, the couple knows that they don’t have much time together. They are trying to catalog their lives together, using memory as a tool: “For so long,” Abe says to Jane, “the remembering kept you alive. You cannot turn back time on the page. That’s what flashbacks are for. And we don’t have the luxury of that. No matter how evocative the language, the life” (280). Soffer’s use of literary devices like metaphor, simile, repetition, and anaphora in Abe’s chapters illustrates his attempt to preserve the life that he and Jane have shared. While Abe knows that he and Jane can’t reverse or stop time, he does believe that in rendering the history of their intimacy, he can honor and protect it. Their sessions of remembering seem to help Jane stay alive for a bit longer, and they also help Abe preserve his connection with his wife, even as he’s in the act of losing her. Memory is a bond, the novel suggests, and when loved ones exchange memories, they are entering into an act of creation and connection. The elliptical syntactic patterns that Soffer uses throughout Abe’s chapters echo the rhythm and tempo of life. The couple’s memories appear on the page as a river of thought and experience—a formal effect that conveys how memory is as unstoppable as time and love.
Recalling and recording his memories also helps Abe process his loss in anticipation of Jane’s death. He knows that language is as “finite” as “[b]reaths, body, steps too” but that memories, like love, don’t have a distinct “ending point” (280). If he can record everything that he and Jane shared, melding both of their experiences on the page, he has a definite artifact of their intimate history.
The Evolution of Love and Relationships
In This Is a Love Story, Soffer explores how love and relationships mutate as a result of time and experience. The novel considers this notion within the context of the intersecting storylines of Abe, Jane, Alice, and Max. The narrative presentation of their parallel experiences echoes Elizabeth Strout’s novel Tell Me Everything, in which characters share the same geographical and physical spaces but have distinct experiences of love and connection. Like Tell Me Everything, This Is a Love Story is divided into a series of narrative strands that gradually inform one another throughout the novel. Abe, Jane, Alice, and Max are all members of the same fictional universe and even have close relationships with each other, but the way their relationships evolve, including the way they perceive love, is unique to each of them. Through this formal strategy, Soffer illustrates the novel’s overarching notion that while love is universal, each individual’s experience of it is particular. This is true because each individual’s experiences are unique and thus guide how their relationships mutate throughout their life.
Abe and Jane’s love for each other strengthens over time because of their uncanny bond. From early on in their relationship, Abe believes that “despite everything [Jane has] been through,” she is “the wisest person [he’s] ever met” (21). He has a deep respect for her that only grows over the years. Jane is similarly deeply attached to Abe from the start of their relationship, although for different reasons. She regards Abe’s love as synonymous with safety, security, and predictability, things she never had in her other intimate relationships. Because of the strength of their bond, the couple’s love doesn’t waver even when they undergo significant trauma, including the deaths of their parents, the loss of Jane’s first pregnancy, her postpartum depression, Abe’s affair with Alice, and her cancer diagnosis. Abe’s retrospective chapters prove that these life challenges have only brought the couple closer, inspiring them to rely on one another for strength even amid adversity.
Alice’s and Max’s experiences of love contrast with Abe and Jane’s, presenting alternate representations of how relationships might change over time. For Alice, her abiding love for Abe fades when she realizes that she can’t be in his life. After Abe’s rejection, she is compelled to question “what [she] truly loved in him, if anything” (112), seeing that maybe she loved his work more than the actual man. When Alice is young, Abe represents love, but as she ages and distances from Abe, her understanding of love changes, which the novel implies is a natural evolution, particularly in the context of her coming of age. For Max, love is an emotional conundrum because of his fraught relationship with his mother. Because Jane’s version of maternal love isn’t conventional, Max questions her affection and devotion. As a result, he resists forming committed, loving relationships with other women—hence his confusion over his feelings for Jaclyn. Soffer uses the examples of Alice and Max to show how the love that one receives in childhood and adolescence impacts the love that one gives and receives in adulthood. Through the juxtaposition of Jane and Abe’s relationship with Alice’s and Max’s experiences, the novel probes the complex ways that one’s notion and experience of love evolves over time.
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