What's in a Love Story?

It's a little creepy when you are discussing something (or someone) and then it pops up unexpectedly in a different location. Just last weekend I got a MySpace message from a childhood friend I hadn't been in touch with in 10 years, but had just been talking about.

And this weekend, after watching Jeux d'enfants (or "Love Me if You Dare") I had been thinking about what makes a love story. And what relationship the love story has with real-life love. (Thank you to my friends who made v thoughtful comments on this topic.) At any rate, I wondered how necessary conflict was to both the story, and the actual love. Was it strengthened by adversity?

Of course, I am not alone pondering this. (Obviously.) I open the LA Times Book Review this afternoon and discover Louisa Thomas' review of the Jeffrey Eugenides anthology My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. And between them, Thomas and Eugenides restate my thoughts, and then respond to them. Check it out:

What makes a love story? The answer found in "My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead," an anthology of short stories edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, may surprise. The thread that binds these 27 disparate tales -- spanning 120 years -- is loneliness. Love here doesn't join people together. More often than not it cracks them apart.

The objects of love can take many forms: the beloveds who don't love their lovers in return. Or the beloveds who were once in love but then fell out. Or the beloveds who have died. Betrayal knows many guises. In each case, the root of these stories is unhappiness; rain is its sustenance (weather is a recurring motif). The blossom -- love -- can be beautiful, but it quickly withers and rots.

"A love story can never be about full possession," Eugenides writes in the book's introduction. "The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name." (Tell that to Jane Austen, but he has a point.)

That quote by Eugenides said - far more coherently than I had been able to - exactly what I had been trying to all weekend long. So thanks.