Love is anything but effortless. It’s an elusive, often overly-abused word occupying our vocabulary. It catches us when we least expect it, is indiscriminate in its scope and power, and can often be difficult to untangle from other tricky concepts, such as lust or affection. Looking back through our lives, each of us can remember moments of inexplicable desire, a longing for another person. We’ve all had unrequited crushes, deep friendships, and broken hearts. Love is often a difficult thing for us to grasp because as soon as we try to articulate it, it slips through our fingers. 

Yet, we can often speak and write about it indirectly, stumbling our way through the messiness of love and how it somehow simultaneously wrecks and gives ultimate meaning to our lives. Combining his penchant for dark, sardonic humor and his knack for connecting the intimately personal with the eternally profound, essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider, in his 2018 collection of essays, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You, writes about his relationships (romantic, platonic, and the chaotic space between the two) with various women throughout his life and the enduring lessons he’s learned along the way. 

Overview: 

Throughout these personal essays, Kreider ruminates on his past relationships with women, giving his thoughts about why they might have ultimately failed and how these themes connect with wider lessons about life itself. From this description alone, it might seem like an overly-indulgent or narcissistic exercise. Yet, Kreider writes about more than just his sexual or romantic escapades. Utilizing a consistent form of self-deprecating humor, Kreider comments on how these relationships have changed him over the years, even if he remains unmarried and a bit aloof. Whether he’s retelling tales of hopping on a train to Mexico with his friend-with-benefits, discussing a one-sided emotional affair with a married woman during the turbulent early Bush era, wryly recounting his weirdly wonderful relationship with a sex worker who was a fan of his work and propositioned him, discussing the vast religious differences with one of his former girlfriends who was a pastor (who also placed a justifiable ultimatum on him in an earlier chapter) or ruminating on his 20-year relationship with his cat (which he humorously mentions as his longest successful relationship), Kreider takes the reader through small vignettes of his personal life with humor and deft. 

As he recounts these experiences, Kreider reflects on his life, keenly aware of the passing of time, noting that the past is ultimately a story that we constantly revise to make sense of life. The essays are not solely focused on romantic relationships, however, as he writes about his involvement in a seminal psychological study on attachment theory as a child, his initial trepidation and eventual fondness for the female college students that he teaches, or even his love for all creatures as he reflects on the guilt of smushing ants, disposing of mouse traps, and rescuing raccoons from dumpsters. Through all of these essays, Kreider meditates on love, regardless of its depth or scope. Kreider loves the subjects of each of the essays, even though that love manifests in different ways and with varying intensity. From each of these essays, Kreider provides the reader with profound insights into what it means to be human, and how to navigate the messiness of life. 

Commendations:

From the outset, this collection of short essays is much more polished and focused than his previous collection, We Learn Nothing. By utilizing the theme of relationships, Kreider offers us a connecting motif throughout the essays. This makes the collection much more even in tone and quality and makes the book not feel like just a random collection of essays, but more like a cohesive whole. Each of the essays shines brilliantly on their own, but also come together to make for a memorable and lasting work. Each one shines a light on our strange existence that we find ourselves within, and Kreider navigates seemingly disparate topics (such as the Iraq War, psychological studies, sex work, and the dynamics between atheism and faith) with relative ease, always connecting his personal experiences with the larger questions of life. Along the way, Kreider utilizes a litany of literary and philosophical characters throughout, including Freud, Descartes, Albee, Neitzche, and more without ever getting caught up in the weeds of theory, making this work accessible and engaging to readers of all levels. 

Furthermore, Kreider has a particular gift for writing about himself in a way that doesn’t come off as being self-indulgent or navel-gazing. While he is self-reflective, he has a talent for disarming his audience through humor, which is often melancholic and mordant. He often writes in beautiful prose, setting up scenes and his complicated relationships with elegant detail before sneaking in an eye-opening and unanticipated gem of wisdom and insight. Also, Kreider loves to play around not only with content but also with form in this collection. The book begins with a humorous Dramatis Personae, listing in traditional theater-booklet form the actors and roles of the various personalities we’ll find throughout the book. The essay concerning his involvement in a psychological study as an infant is organized like a scientific study, with section headers labeled “Abstract,” Introduction,” “Methods,” “Results,” and “Discussion.” There are also small quips in the acknowledgments and a footnote in the table of contents that explains the asterisks beside certain chapters: “Note to Mom: do not read.” These small details, while certainly not hidden from plain view, often feel like little easter eggs or treasures that reward the keen and inquisitive eye. 

Finally, as always, Kreider is remarkably honest and vulnerable in these essays. He often intelligently and humorously articulates what many of us probably think on a day to day basis, but still hesitate to say out loud. He doesn’t tiptoe around his foibles and makes no apologies or excuses for his secret thoughts. Instead, Kreider is a writer who is keenly aware of his glaring faults, and he humbly lays them out there for the reader to judge accordingly. This kind of intellectual and personal honesty is quite refreshing to read, and it feels like you’re sitting at a bar with an old friend just before final call, telling stories, and contemplating your place in the universe. Kreider certainly has a talent for making you stop for just a brief second and think about the world differently. This book, perhaps due to the nature of the subject matter, feels deeply intimate, and Kreider kindles a type of trust with the reader through his relatability and disarming charm. 

Critique: 

As a collection of essays, there’s honestly not too much to critique. As I’ve written before elsewhere, Kreider is very self-deprecating, and a personality that can take some accommodating to. His honesty is commendable, but sometimes his musings can feel a bit incomplete or even dicey at times (such as when writing about his ultimately unfounded fear about sleeping with his female students). He occasionally uses unsavory language at times (such as making a joke to one of his friends that suggested he give an uplifting, though kitsch gift to his pastor girlfriend, saying “Lea, she’s religious, not retarded” (180)), and often doesn’t hold back in laying bare some of his past mistakes (such as his relationship with a twenty-one-year-old when he was forty, and her subsequent claim that the relationship had made her feel used, much to his initial indignation). Yet, Kreider is nothing if not self-reflective, always thoroughly thinking through these dilemmas and coming out of them with grace and sincere repentance. He owns up to his shortcomings, and not just in word to us as readers, but (as long as we take his word on it) also by reaching out and reconciling with those whom he has hurt in the past (whether intentionally or unintentionally). Through these essays, we see Kreider maturing in many ways, leaving behind the wild nature of his youth in favor of a more stable, if melancholic attitude towards the world and his place in it. 

Conclusion: 

Overall, Kreider’s latest collection of essays is a wholly worthwhile read, as he recounts his foibles and troubles with relationships to ruminate on the deeper question of life. While his wild escapades tend to leave you incredulous and often chuckling at his mistakes, he also draws you into deeper contemplation of things, whether its politics, philosophy, or religion. These essays tug on your heartstrings, as you’ll often find yourself laughing and tearing up in just a few short pages. Some of the stories that Kreider tells might not be for everyone (especially if you are not the most open towards alternative lifestyles). But you cannot deny that Kreider has a gift for connecting the intimately personal with the deeply profound. And that, above all else, is truly the mark of a good storyteller.