Essays in Love

What it is about

Essays in Love, also issued as On Love, is Alain de Botton’s earlier novel, shelved beside The Course of Love as the chapter before marriage. A narrator falls into a beginning romance, and the chapters lay interpretations over it: fate, the wish to be chosen, jealousy, and the theories people use to explain a feeling that has not yet become a life together. The book’s subject is those interpretations, including the rupture, not the later work of children, sulk, and staying. It is fiction with essay chapters, not a study and not a workbook.

Questions it can answer

• What kinds of interpretation do people attach to a romance that has only just begun?
• How does the book separate being chosen, or idealised, from being known?
• What does this novel treat as the material of early love, as against the marriage novel beside it?

What you will not find

• Research findings or clinical protocols
• The Course of Love’s plot of marriage, children, and staying, retold
• Advice that the narrator’s choices are a model to copy