Book: All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps by Dave Isay
Reviewed by: Julie W.
I’m a sucker for a good love story. I cry at weddings. I fill up my Netflix queue with romantic comedies. Give me a tale of two souls struggling to find one another in the chaos of human existence and I can’t get enough. I was raised on the Beatles; I believe love really is all this world needs to go round (or at least to make those revolutions worthwhile).
So naturally, I dove right into All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps. A long-time NPR junkie, I’m a big fan of shows like This American Life and StoryCorps. There is nothing more riveting (or educational) to me than someone telling their story in their own voice.
The stories in this collection were all recorded as conversations in StoryCorps booths around the country. The book is structured into three parts: “Found”, “Lost” and “Found At Last”. Each conversation is a few pages long. I whipped through the first section, devouring the bite size tales of love found at a toll both on the New York State Thruway, in Iraq, in a Paul Bunyan restaurant. There are stories of love overcoming cultural conflict and taboo, of unfolding across distances of space and time. By the end of this section, my heart was full. Love conquers all!
Then I came to the second section, and the stories of love lost. I wept my way through these stories, as people described losing the loves of their lives to illness, accidents, terrorist attacks, Alzheimer’s. StoryCorps is all about recording the truth of human existence, and if there is such a thing as true love, then there is most certainly such a thing as true heartbreak. But this section is uplifting in its own way. As Cindy puts it in her story of losing her love, Dan, to HIV,
“The truth is, falling in love doesn’t save us from the big, bad, icky things that can happen in the world. But the thing I’d want for people to know the most about Dan and I is that we had an incredible love story despite a horrible virus.”
The final section of All There Is shares stories of those people who found love when it was unexpected. I particularly enjoyed this section. Here is where you’ll find stories of people who thought it was too late, or thought that love just wasn’t something that would happen to them, but then there’s a spark, they take a chance – that leap! There is such hope to be found in the courage of these storytellers, and such inspiration – for love and life beyond love – to take up the reins of your own existence and just say YES.
It’s the balance of these three sections – the joy, the heartache, and the persistence of love in all its forms – that makes this book so enjoyable. It’s easy to look at a collection of love stories and write it off as mush, but All There Is, by not idling in the saccharine cliches of heart shaped destinies and instead offering up love’s truths, is a collection as strong as the emotion it chronicles, and a perfect fit in the palm of any Valentine.
Dave Isay will be here at BookPeople to speak & sign All There Is on Saturday, February 11, 7p.
BookPeople 