Mandy Len Catron

I am torn between giving this 5 stars and 3 stars. The author/memoirist has hit on an interesting topic, but her delivery on the audiobook is so 'sad sack'! I get it, because her views are pessimisti, but geez!! by the end it so annoyed me, despite the worthwhile content, that I can barely recommend it. But I will ...

How to Fall in Love with Anyone, could be renamed Does Love Exist? or Can Humans Know Love? as I'm not sure if Mandy will allow herself to believe the love concept is valid.

I feel sorry for Mandy, she worries so much about when do you know if a person is right for them? even if you actually do think you love them. Such anxieties! Too much choice?

As a sucker for fairytales, I kept hoping she would arrive at some insight that would be useful and inspiring to me. But it didn't come. She had a few good ideas, like the need for all of us to be kinder to each other.

Obviously Kevin wasn't the easiest to live with, but he had his good points. That seems pretty realistic in what life offers.… (más)

One time, on a long road trip with my brother through the middle-of-nowhere-California, we got to talking about some really deep stuff. I remember portions of that conversation vividly, because it was the first time I realized, or admitted, that I did not really know how to love. Not just someone. Anyone, really.

This has followed me around my whole life, so I suppose I was attracted to the title of this book, because someone was finally going to tell me how it worked.

Spoiler alert: it's not a guide. It's not a self-help book. But it's encouraging in the way you read any story where you see a version of yourself in the hero. We are very different people, with dissimilar personal histories, this author and I, but we share commonalies: a pragmatic, almost scientific take on the nature and the progression of love and a rejection of empty platitudes; a desire to understand how institutions around love formed for economic or political gain; a suspicion that the love stories we tell ourselves and to each other are convenient lies. If there's an audience for this book, it's because most of us need to be reminded there's no such thing as the one true path for falling in love, and whether you've dated a million people or zero, no one really knows what they're doing. We just like pretending that we do.… (más)

In 2015, Mandy Len Catron's essay, titled "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This," was published in the Modern Love section of the New York Times. On the basis of that successful article, Catron has written a memoir in essays, examining her own love stories as well as those of her parents, relatives, friends, and even some strangers she got to know in the course of writing the book. She discusses research into love, and of course, she talks about the night she described in the original article, where she and an acquaintance asked each other a prescribed series of increasingly personal questions, then stared into one another's eyes for four minutes straight.

It's always interesting to read other people's ideas about and experiences of love. I appreciated Catron's down-to-earth approach, and the questions she had, especially when considering her parents' divorce and the breakup of her own long-term relationship. I didn't have any particular epiphanies regarding love, but I liked a lot of what Catron had to say. I felt she occasionally veered into preachiness, and her bias was evident in spots, but that's to be expected with any book, and one that styles itself a memoir particularly.

I listened to this audiobook, rather than reading the print version. It was read by the author, which is so rarely a good idea. In this case, the narration was at the bottom range of what I consider acceptable: clear, but occasionally oddly inflected, and with significant vocal fry. If that last trait irritates you, steer clear of this audiobook. The book itself, however, is worth reading if you have an interest in the topic.… (más)