Everybody likes a good love story and it's even better when they’re true. To celebrate Valentine’s Day, we’re taking you through the best memoirs about love. In recounting how they made it to bliss, these comedians, book editors and journalists tackle it all: finding love, rejecting love, keeping love and sometimes losing it. Whether you’re looking for it, hiding from it, or already have it in spades, these books about love are sure to warm your heart.
As a seasoned editor at Harlequin, Patience Bloom knows romance. But, when Romance Is My Day Job opens, her own love life is decidedly lacking in the passion and glamour that she reads about day in and day out. Then one day, an old flame sends her a Facebook message, and everything changes. This memoir is a heartwarming and plucky look at how real-life romance unfolds, and how even the “experts” among us sometimes struggle to find love.
We’ve written a lot about Rob Sheffield’s latest memoir, Turn Around Bright Eyes, which tells the story of how he fell in love with his second wife. But, to best appreciate that journey, you have to start at the beginning. In Love Is a Mix Tape, Sheffield chronicles his first love and the utter heartbreak of losing his first wife, through track listings that evoke the nostalgic days of making mix tapes (and then mix CDs) for your crush.
In her no-nonsense, wisecracking way, comedian Ophira Eisenberg recounts all of the relationships that led this skeptic to actually dive into getting married. Almost anthropological in her methods, Eisenberg recounts her childhood perceptions of marriage, her first experimentations as a teenager and twentysomething, and the good and bad relationships she kept returning to over the years. But the best is when she meets her husband, and especially the chapter about their wedding day. This is a great read for any stalwartly single friend who scoffs at monogamy.
The real heartbreakers aren’t the obvious players, they’re the “sensitive” types who seem like they’d treat you right—just ask Julie Klausner. In this bitingly funny memoir, Klausner recounts a long history of romantic failures and writes a taxonomy of the men she’s unsuccessfully dated. Written on the heels of a wildly popular Modern Love column in the New York Times about being snubbed by an indie-rocker, I Don’t Care About Your Band is Klausner’s cynical treatise on dating jerks in your 20s.