"The love of my life" by T.C. Boyle

This is a story about the disillusionments of young love, disillusionments that are fostered by TV and movies, as well as by the lack of good examples of how love should look, which is evidenced in the story by Jeremy’s missing parents and China’s absence of an instructive mother. It is also a tale of the injustice that can occur as a result of a relationship. It was China who refused to see a doctor, to do everything secretively; Jeremy wanted her to go see a doctor from the start. But it was clearly Jeremy who lost everything in the end. You could even see in the story that Jeremy had strong feelings of anguish at what he had to do to the baby, whereas China handled everything with a steely coldness, down to the trial, when she pressed charges against Jeremy and lied about what happened. Although China seems to genuinely long for Jeremy at the end, I think it is more about her longing for better days than for her actually feeling any sympathy toward Jeremy. Her interests are wholly self-centered, while I think Jeremy always had China’s best interests in mind. I feel bad for Jeremy at the conclusion of this piece.

I thought the descriptions were really beautiful. “They kissed, her lips so cold it was like kissing a steak through the plastic wrapper.” Boyle’s writing is covered in raw rhetoric like this; often his descriptions are so raw and tangible it makes you cringe to read them.

I thought the jumping around in time was pretty confusing in places, and I don’t think it does anything really special for the story. Until I was nearly finished with the story, I wasn’t sure if the movie scene came before or after the spring break part. There was something about the narrative arc of the story that, for me, left me unsure the order of events for a good portion of the story.