Heart the Lover by Lily King

"You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you're reading it," (Heart the Lover, p. 189).

The summer after I "graduated" college I was supposed to be working at the summer camp that I had worked at the year before, but an autoimmune diagnosis left me living at my parents’ house, unemployed, and literally allergic to the sun. On a late June afternoon, I covered myself in SPF 70 and joined two friends at the side of a river, where we collected rocks, read our books, and reminisced about how lucky we were to have gone to college together and be from the same hometown. As we lay on our towels listening to the water, one of my friends asked if I had ever read Lily King. I had not. She told me I might like it. Not to be dramatic, but I often think of this moment as a life-changing one.

our lovely day by the river.

A week after that day by the river, I went to a local bookstore and picked up a copy of Writers and Lovers. As I read it over the following few weeks, I felt a shift. I can remember exactly when and where I read each part of the book. It truly altered and intensified my own experience of life while I was reading it. When I finished it, in my hotel room at my cousin's wedding, I cried. I cried because it was over, because it was beautiful, because I had not felt such strong love for a book since finishing Rick Riordan's Heroes of Olympus series in seventh grade.

When my roommate informed me early in the summer that Lily King was releasing a new book in October, I reacted like a true fangirl. When the book was released, she bought it immediately, read it in one day, and then gave it to me. She told me she liked it but wished it had been longer. I told her not to tell me anything else. I wanted to go in blind. I wanted Lily King to absolutely devastate me and change my outlook on life once again. And my god, she did.

Heart the Lover is a story split between late college/early post-grad life, and middle age. The narrator becomes entangled with two well-read honors students in her literature class, and through them she learns to love, to write, to play dumb card games. In middle age, she is somewhat haunted by the intensity of that first love. The novel tackles my favorite question: how does time work? Are we only in the present, or are we everywhere all at once? I have often found myself hoping that time exists all around us, that everything that ever has been and ever will be exists everywhere, but we can only see the present moment. Lily King, however, has once again changed my perspective on life. Maybe it is okay if all we have is the present moment. Even if time exists all around us, we can only observe it in the present moment, so what does it matter? We are only ever where we are. We only ever have right now.

The final line of Heart the Lover is, "you're here," an affirmation that, despite intense grief, indecision, avoidance, pain, you still exist. Despite losing one true love and finding another, despite not knowing what the future holds, you exist in this moment, and that is what matters.