True Love: A Novel

Written by Sarah Gerard

Narrated by Sophie Amoss

An Entertainment Weekly 30 Hottest Books of the Summer Selection • A Refinery29 25 Books You’ll Want To Read This Summer Selection

One of today’s most provocative literary writers—the author of the critically-acclaimed Sunshine State and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Binary Star—captures the confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a dark comedy about a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump.

Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it.

From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable “relationship” in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus.

Nina’s quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human—a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in an era defined by detachment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780063007895

Sarah Gerard

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the novel Binary Star, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, and the anthologies Tampa Noir, We Can’t Help it if We’re From Florida, and One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. She lives in New York City with her true love, the writer Patrick Cottrell. Find her at Sarah-Gerard.com.

[angelalam-300700 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was reluctant to read this book after the negative community reviews, but I am glad I did.

The characters resonated with me. Maybe I am an unlikable, toxic, and immature reader. Maybe my bandwidth of relationships only spans the dark side. I don't know.

What I do know is I found so much to enjoy about this book, from the language to the ease of narrative flow to the delightfully disjointed characters and their problems.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Nina is drifting through life, and choosing the worst men along the way. She becomes involved with Seth, an artist, who doesn't really do much, but also can't be bothered with her. Even if he asks her to come over, he may not answer the door when she arrives. Yet, this only heightens her ardor and when she moves to New York from Florida to attend an MFA program, Seth comes along because he wants to live in New York and she's willing to pack up his stuff, rent the moving van and make housing arrangements for them in New York. But in New York, Seth is incapable of holding a job, unwilling to do menial work, leaving Nina scrambling to support both of them. When Seth turns jealous and needy, Nina switches over to Aaron, with as much drama and conflict that she can wring out of the situation.

Nina is a lot to deal with. The friends she manages to keep are all messes themselves, as is her mother. There's a whole genre of novel of women destroying their own lives over terrible men, similar to the WMFuN,* but differing in that in these novels, selfless men don't leap out to help the women, nor is eventual forgiveness a given. But usually, and usually in most novels, there's character development, the protagonist is changed over the course of the novel, or seems like they would like to, at least. That doesn't happen here. Nina's path is a circular one, endlessly repeating the same behaviors, endlessly justifying them with the language she picked up in therapy. And since Nina's behavior is the same at the end of the book as it was at the beginning, the beginning and end are merely arbitrary. She'll switch men at some point, take advantage of different acquaintances and co-workers next time, find a new thing to be utterly irresponsible about.

Gerard can write well. And she can create scenes that are so vivid I would cringe. But the lack of an arc to this story left me feeling unmoored. What's the point of reading about a terrible person continuing to be terrible in the same way to different people? I do love an unlikeable narrator, but Nina's self pity and manipulations never led anywhere. Still, Gerard clearly has a great deal of promise as a novelist and I look forward to seeing how her writing develops.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel