Book Review: "Conversations on Love" by Natasha Lunn

The first thing I did with this book is I grabbed a highlighter, not because there were lots of important things to note, but because there was a lot of wider reading and people referenced and interviewed within - including the brilliant Alain de Botton. I have to say that there were a few things I found to be say, overly optimistic about this book and, I think it presumes a lot about the general population that it doesn't have any data for. This book, despite its presumptions, deals more with feelings and the author's (fairly uninteresting) love life but atop of this, it doesn't give us any statistics to wrestle with, nor does it present a coherent argument. Be that as it may, at times it can be a fairly enjoyable read with some lovely familiar characters such as: Roxanne Gay, Dolly Alderton, Alain de Botton and many more.

Let's start with one of the key advantages of this book: the conversation the author has with Alain de Botton about love and all of its mysteries. If you know me then you'll know that these ideas about love are alien to me - I don't think I really love anyone except for perhaps my immediate family and it would be a bit of a lie to say otherwise. This is why I read books like this: to learn about this stuff. However, sometimes, like in the case of the author of this book, there seems to be a disconnect from actual reality in the sense that many people don't actually put romantic love as highly in their priority list as she does and yet, that seems to be not something that is understood by her. We are thankful for Alain de Botton for bringing some intelligence to the book in his words concerning the fact that sometimes expectations and realities are not the same thing and the difference between sink and swim is what we do with this confrontation we are forced into.

At the end of each interview, the author asks 'what do you wish you knew about love?' or something along the same lines and the answer is always something profound and of course, worthy of an Instagram quotable. I think if you asked a regular person what they wished they had known about love, the answer would be much more mundane. I find that these people, including the author, have mostly unrelatable lives in which the reader cannot make top or tail of it. This is either because there are far too many socials involved (I can't imagine that these close and intricate friendships are too important to a person who works 6/7 days of the week and many hours of the day, maybe paying the bills are though), or it is because they are just a bit too 'he said, she said' in a way that doesn't read very intelligently. Maybe it's my own view but I think people who prioritise romantic love in their lives are among the most boring of all people because they base their worth on whether they have anybody, not on whether they are anybody.

Be that as it may, the most interesting story was the one of Juno Dawson. Juno Dawson is a transwoman who had to first go under a transition to understand herself before knowing who she truly was: a woman. Only then, Dawson states, could she actually fall in love properly. This makes not only a lot of sense but it is intriguing to get this story from someone who has had to go on this journey of discovery in a way that many of us never will. Juno Dawson talks about how she first went on that road and how pre-transition, she always felt quite empty about not knowing what she wanted or how. The book does teach us one main theme: that we must know who we are before we fall in love. To be honest, I love this for Juno Dawson, I love the fact that she knows who she is now and is living her most authentic life. This is the one thing that holds this book together.

Honestly though, if we see through the bullshit and read deeply into the sections by people who know what they're talking about (Alain de Botton, Roxanne Gay, Dolly Alderton etc) and those who have been to hell and back again in the realm of self-discovery (Juno Dawson) then we can definitely see how the book does well in its analysis of the self rather than just how the course of true love never really does run smooth.