When Love Hurts

Jennifer Finney Boylan—author of She’s Not There, the best-selling transgender memoir—contributed one of the most poignant essays with observations like this: “I did love her, though, for a little while anyhow. That was the thing: I still believed, on some fundamental level, that love could cure me. That if I were only loved deeply enough by someone else I could be content enough to stay a man.”

The end of a romantic dream is a kind of death, its passing seldom marked with a funeral, just ongoing waves of regret or sometimes relief.

Even Taeckens—goaded on by his contributors and their “soul-baring”—discarded his resolve and turned author of a bittersweet essay that recounts his awestruck relationship with a charismatic visiting professor from the West Coast, one of those romantic idylls conducted at warp speed but destined for incendiary crash. “Everything had been so perfect,” Taeckens writes, “except that he hated so much about me and cheated on me and left town without saying good-bye and gave me crabs.”

The one question that Taeckens hesitated to ask himself was whether readers want another anthology of writers on this subject or that. Publishing is in the doldrums but anthologies have remained one of its few growth sectors for several years. There are anthologies of writers on summer camp, on miscarriages, on empty nests, on unforgettable meals, on favorite films, on in-laws, on bad girls and much more. Taeckens’ was aware of that so he was relieved by what his contributors delivered. “There is an edge to this anthology,” he says, “that a lot of other anthologies don’t have.”

The concluding essay by Wendy Brenner, the collection’s strongest, proves his point. It is raw, intense, heart-rending—and almost did not get written. Brenner had initially declined Taeckens’ invitation to contribute because she still was in the after-throes of grief over a longtime love’s death only a month before. They had almost gotten married but never did, this older man she had known since high school who always seemed “too dangerous,” “too intense,” “too unknowable.” But his downward spiral and death in a residential hotel propelled Brenner through a painful remembrance of their past, including his letter, soon after they agreed to get married, that asked: “Do you love me? Is this going to be okay—even fun? Are we in a big hurry? I don’t want to burn this thing out. Is it going to end? Please—I have to know.”

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John Douglas Marshall is the author of Reconciliation Road, an award-winning memoir, and co-author of Volcano: The Eruption of Mount St. Helens, a New York Times’ bestseller. He was the longtime book critic of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer until it ceased publication in March.