How We Love

 

Image credit: Allen & Unwin

Continuing with the stack of post-lockdown titles that I had been keenly waiting for, this week I entered the world of Clementine Ford. I witnessed her love, lose, crush, and grow in her latest book, How We Love.

If you’ve read Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys, then you’re probably used to the passionate and factual narratives about gender that Clementine Ford has become known for. How We Love is a definite step in the opposite direction, however it is no less passionate or important than her previous works. 

Beginning with a confronting chapter about her relationship with her mother and watching her battle with cancer, How We Love is a series of love stories depicting key romantic and love-filled relationships that have shaped Ford into the beautiful woman she is. Mostly memoir, but also personal exploration into the strange methods of acting on and recognising love (rather like a lengthy thought-piece), it’s a book that’s filled with feeling, reflections, and understanding. 

Image credit: The Guardian

What I loved about this book, the thing that kept me turning the pages at a machine-gun pace, was Ford’s incredible ability to put frustratingly incomprehensible feelings (like anxiety) into words, structured sentences, and crisp images. I was impressed and awed by Ford’s poeticism as well as her incredible talents in observation of her environment and herself. To then be able to succinctly put these observations and feelings into a string of profound and beautiful sentences made me question by own abilities as a writer. There’s rawness to Ford’s prose, making all her stories relatable and thus sparking the feels in the reader. 

If you’re a fan of Clementine Ford, then I would absolutely recommend How We Love: it’s warm, real, and (mostly) reassuring. It’s a book filled with love and hope, needed now at the end of the world. 

Author: Clementine Ford, 2021

Published: Allen & Unwin, NSW, 2021