I once loved a man who loved romantic comedies, the kind I wouldn’t be caught dead watching. The Wedding Planner. Legally Blonde. His favorite movie was Casablanca. (I thought Casablanca was fine.) He was a cop in New Orleans, and one night at our favorite smoky dive, I caught him debating another cop about the meaning of The Notebook.

I was in my early 30s and, inconvenient to this love story, living in Brooklyn. My favorite TV show was The Wire, and my favorite re-watch was Goodfellas. I was a romantic in hiding, burying her girlish hopes and dreams under a thousand Parliament Lights and dirty martinis and “[bleep] that, mother[bleep]er.”

That cop broke my heart. I call his style of exit “the guillotine option.” In the months when I missed him so bad it was close to a fugue state, I re-watched Casablanca, which was better than I remembered, and I watched Legally Blonde, which was not for me. I was searching for clues about his sudden departure; I was trying to find him again, anywhere he might be.

It took a decade, but I finally watched The Notebook (my friend Carey made me), and it wasn’t terrible, in fact, I cried buckets. I can’t tell you if my resistance to those romantic classics was cinephile snobbery, or an alt-weekly veteran’s allergy to mainstream popularity, or a desperate need to prove that I was not, in fact, what I was: a softie, a sensitive type, a weeper and a clinger and a lonelyheart. In other words, a writer.

It was only in the years after I got sober, at 35, that I remembered how long romantic comedies — or, at least, movies about love and romance — had been part of my DNA. One of my first movie obsessions, at the age of seven, was the 1981 film On Golden Pond, which I’d call a family drama, though it has rom-com trappings, including a love story between an elderly couple, played by Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, and an opposites-attract storyline between Fonda and his rebellious grandson, played by Doug McKeon, younger brother of Nancy, Jo from Facts of Life.

I cried buckets during Titanic, and I cried buckets during Kramer vs. Kramer, which I watched in high school, not understanding why tears leaked down my face, as though I’d caught a rare disorder. But that film, a divorce drama, raised a question I could hardly bear to ask: How could you love someone — and then not? It seemed like the saddest story ever, with the possible exception of the one where everyone you know is going to die. (That’s called life.)

Romantic comedy is a genre with strict conventions I’m too lazy to Google. Marketing departments and streaming services act like the category is black-and-white, but most movies worth watching are a universe of grayscale. What if a film is deeply romantic but not at all funny? What if it’s also a heist film? A murder mystery? A cautionary tale?

I still keep my distance from mainstream rom-coms, which I find corny and too predictable, but I love romance, and I love comedy, so what’s a girl to do? Amazon Prime may require categories, but the heart knows no boundaries. I’m just a dreamer seeking a little company in her own human drama, and I will submit the best stories are always about love.

And so, the list. The following are in the order I remembered them.

Broadcast News (1987)

“I would give anything if you were two people,” the TV reporter played by Albert Brooks tells the TV producer played by Holly Hunter, “so I could call up the one who’s my friend and tell her about the one I like so much.”

That line — or a version of it — found its way into every play or short story or half-novel I wrote in high school, one of your first clues that a) I was not going to give up this writing dream, and b) I would steal, I would pillage, I had no shame.

“I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time” is another classic Albert Brooks line, delivered to Hunter in a heated moment, one of the best you-get-the-idea gestures I’ve ever heard. Broadcast News is about the degradation of TV journalism during the corporate buyouts and mergers of the ‘80s, a tabloid era, though to watch the film now is to ache for a time when we only had three channels and the logic of it-bleeds-it-leads was contained to a few hours in the morning and evening.

I have rarely identified with a female lead the way I did with Hunter, aka Jane, a pint-sized pistol devoted to her gig. “You look so clean and pretty” is a thing that was said to me once, during the years I lived in NYC. “Clean?” Hunter asks in the film, but in real life, I said, “Umm, thanks.”

Hunter falls for the dopey charmer played by John Hurt and feels repelled by Albert Brooks, the almost-brother and surrogate partner she cannot imagine being romantic with, despite the fact that he’s clearly in love with her. Writer/director James L. Brooks wrote the character of Jane based on influential film producer Polly Platt, who has largely been lost to history but is extensively rediscovered in Karina Longworth’s 2020 pod You Must Remember This.

Broadcast News remains one of the great cautionary tales about modern media and a must-watch for any workaholic in search of love.

Annie Hall (1977)

I started watching Woody Allen movies because smart people in New York loved him, and that’s where I was aiming my arrow. A high school girl stuck in Dallas, I was dreaming of the day I finally broke free, proved everyone wrong, with their Steel Magnolias and Lonesome Dove. (Lonesome Dove: One of the best novels about love ever written, though I didn’t realize that till my 40s.)

I can’t remember my first Woody Allen movie. Bananas? Sleepers? My parents were low-key Woody Allen fans, who saw Hannah and Her Sisters at the indie theater down the street (the Inwood). I liked the broad comedies, but I loved the ‘70s canon of urban sophisticates falling in and out of love. Manhattan briefly eclipsed Annie Hall (too obvious), and I hung the picture of Allen and Keaton under the Manhattan Bridge in my dorm room in Austin, Texas, the state I could not seem to leave despite only ever wanting to do so.

My one gripe with Annie Hall — and this will be controversial — is that I don’t instinctively like Annie, with her lah-dee-dahs and “oh noooo, a spider.” Based on the actual Diane Keaton, a woman I suspect I would have adored, Annie is the kind of daffy East Coast elite who mystified me as a teen. My mother is a highly articulate therapist with a velvet alto, the aunt who practically raised me is a brassy Midwesterner, my friends’ mothers were Southern hostesses and matriarchs.

So I saw myself in Allen, the neurotic overthinker estranged in his own frail body. My junior year of high school, I directed a ten-minute stage version of Annie Hall (which I transcribed and edited myself, naturally), but I couldn’t star in it, given that I couldn’t possibly play a beautiful, vapid-but-weirdly-soulful waif. I cast a senior who impressed me, and my then-boyfriend starred as Allen. He nailed the role.

It Happened One Night (1934)

I saw this Frank Capra classic in high school drama, and the relentless charm of Clark Gable punctured my kneejerk dislike of black-and-white films. He’s like a proto-George Clooney, those soulful eyes and a brow so expressive it can reach even the cold cold heart of a cynical teen, no matter the era.

Claudette Colbert is cute, too, with that cartoon heart of a mouth and the half-moon lids, a Dorothy Parker in better clothes, but she was a bit petulant for my tastes and those pencil-thin eyebrow arches squicked me out (sorry, ‘30s girlies). Some moments will rattle modern viewers: Colbert gets slapped, thrown over a shoulder like a ragdoll, talked down to like the baby she often pretends to be.

It was Gable who stole my heart, with the strong, soft body of a man who has never seen a gym. He’s highly verbal with a delicate-boned facial structure — not a man’s man but a woman’s man, who speaks a woman’s language (long sentences, lingering eye contact). Watching him smoke in bed in silk pajamas still gets my motor running.

The film is a Depression-era misadventure about two unlikely co-conspirators in a scam. Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight comes to mind as an obvious imitator, not just because it stars Peak Clooney.

The screwball comedies of the ‘30s — the Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder of it all —understood what Pat Benatar later informed us: Love is a battlefield. It is the poison and the cure. The heartsickness of falling for your opposite is a delicious torture, especially when you realize that your opposite is, in fact, your soul match.

Grease (1978)

I recently made my pod partner Nancy Rommelmann watch this musical, one of the highest-grossing films of the ‘70s, the decade that brought us the blockbuster.

“It was like getting hit in the face with a fucking frying pan,” she told me, in a clip I have watched a dozen times.

Nancy grew up in New York City during the ‘70s, and somehow made it to the age of [redacted] without seeing a movie that defined a certain coming-of-age, but according to her, at least, Grease is NOT the word.

Then there’s me. I was four when I saw Grease, around seven when I became fixated on the soundtrack (a double-album masterpiece), and the film created the blueprint for what I’d later seek in entertainment and men. The sly grooves and singable harmonies, the troubled cigarette smokers, the slick costumes, the clever banter. (“Tell me about it, stud.”) The boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, everyone sings and dances until boy-gets-girl-back storyline may be tiresome — and don’t even ask today’s teenager to watch this film, with its tongue-in-cheek Borscht Belt one-liners about sex as combat — but its lesson is eternal.

Love wins [cue the flying car].

Jerry Maguire (1996)

Coming out in 1996, two years after Kurt Cobain took his own life, Jerry Maguire was the anti-Nirvana, a feel-good movie about a sports agent, of all things, whose quest for sincerity becomes an antidote to the chokehold of ‘90s cynicism.

“You complete me” has become a pop culture cliche but for good reason: It expresses the longing to be made whole by another. That may be doomed (if the therapists are correct), but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it.

Cuba Gooding Jr. deserved his Oscar. Renee Zellweger has never been sexier, prettier, more sweetly and quietly knowing. Tom Cruise will probably not be remembered for this role, even if the movie was so popular that VHS copies currently clog the landfills, but I will launch half a dozen valid counter-arguments when I tell you, with the confidence of a woman who has recently studied his canon: This is his best role.

Harold and Maude (1971)

I was hungover in my mid-20s when I watched this Hal Ashby movie, which flopped upon release only to become a cult classic. I was living alone in the late ‘90s, an ironic and decadent time, so for me, the film’s dark comedy clicked into place alongside PT Anderson and Quentin Tarantino and whatever Harvey Weinstein was commandeering over at Miramax.

Bud Cort as Harold opens the film with a fake suicide attempt, which his brittle mother — a pitch-perfect Vivian Pickles — dismisses as “amateur theatrics.” As Maude, Ruth Gordon is the zippy senior citizen who frees Harold from his conformist cage, a very Free to Be You and Me notion of character arc, which also helps explain why the ‘70s were so great and terrible at once. (Basically half of ‘70s films can be boiled down to: Screw society, be yourself.)

“Let your feelings flow,” sings musician Cat Stevens (who later let his feelings flow by renaming himself Yusuf Islam), and boy did Harold take that advice. This is the only film I’m aware of wherein a teen boy lies in bed, post-coital, beside an 80-something woman. Maude is the manic pixie dream girl before that archetype had a name. The film pokes fun at its own excesses, even as it embraces them.

“Do you think the sexual revolution has gone too far?” Harold’s mother asks at one point, filling out a questionnaire. “Oh, yes.”

The Breakfast Club (1985)

“It’s not a romantic comedy,” the audience is already objecting. Are you sure? Ten near strangers, thrown together in Saturday detention. They hate each other, until they discover they need each other.

“When you grow up, your heart dies,” the character played by Ally Sheedy says, in one of the film’s many quotable lines. Writer/director John Hughes gave us the love stories that shaped Gen X — Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off —and that line proved a tough one to shake. It left many of us with an outsized attachment to the one thing that must die in order to keep living: our youth.

Magnolia (1999)

Like most PTA movies, Magnolia is about family. But Anderson wrote it as he was falling for Fiona Apple, listening to Aimee Mann on repeat (and stealing a few of her best lines), probably indulging in some non-prescribed drugs, and the madness spills across the page, particularly in the oddball pairing of Claudia, a cocaine-snorting waif played by Melora Walters, and a daft but lovable cop played by John C. Reilly, one of the great character actors of our time.

Magnolia is best remembered as a vehicle for Tom Cruise’s showiest role as Frank “TJ” Mackey, a pick-up artist working through daddy issues by pillaging the bodies of women and the wallets of men. It’s a tremendous performance, but it’s a performance, not a naturalistic channeling, which is my preferred mode for acting genius (but that is only a preference). The scene of Cruise breaking down at the deathbed of his father, played by a perfectly cast Jason Robards, reminds me of myself after a serious breakup.

Not to be too Freudian, but love is mostly about family of origin. We’re searching to fill the hole blasted open by a wound so early we may not even remember the cratering. The sideplot of William H. Macy as a former whiz kid may be the overstuffed plot’s least crucial story arc, but Macy delivers the film’s most heartbreaking line. Having smashed in his teeth after falling during an attempted break-in hijacked by frogs falling from the sky (you’ll have to see the film, I guess), he says: “I really do have love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.”

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

This movie cuts to my soul so deeply I couldn’t bring myself to re-watch it for this list. Writer Charlie Kaufman + director Michel Gondry + an everyman Jim Carrey + a luminous Kate Winslet, with assists from Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst and (I tend to forget this) Elijah Wood. This movie is so gorgeous it hurts, like staring too long into the sun.

You’ll just have to take my word on this one.

Her (2013)

This Spike Jonze comedy is about a sad sack writer (Joaquin Phoenix) downloading an AI companion (the sultry voice of Scarlett Johansson) to get over the end of his marriage to a woman played by Rooney Mara, looking and sounding suspiciously like Jonze’s real-life ex, Sofia Coppola.

Set in the near future, the film predicted much of the romantic mess we’re currently inhabiting. It’s become so commonplace to reference Her in stories about AI, the hellscape of online dating, and the hologram of virtual sex that I’ve started to groan at the allusion, even as I make it, too. I once Googled “what year was Her set,” because I wasn’t sure. And though Jonze was vague on this detail, the Internet’s best guess is 2025, which — like so much of this film — feels exactly right.

Welcome to modern love. The upside? It’s very funny.

Your turn now. Tell me your favorite movies about love in the comments.

Leave a comment

Read a short except from my book!

If you are lucky in this life, you get one great love, and the people who marry that person and cook dinner together in a too-crowded kitchen, moving around each other like dancers in their closest orbit? Those people won the lottery.

Most of us will have different tales. A great love who lights up a string of months, and a longtime companion who makes your life easier and keeps the lonely nights at bay. No less great, better in many ways, but not the same. Perhaps a second love greater than the first. Perhaps a third love better than a second, a fifteenth better than the fourteenth—but mostly because you are better now, stronger and wiser, in part because of those previous loves, still living inside you.

Preorder The Only Thing There Is to Want

Share

I was in my mid-20s, at a low point with booze, when a dear friend living in San Francisco wrote me a list of things to do instead of drinking. I don’t have it in front of me, but I remember it like this: “One. Talk on the phone to me! Two. Long walks.” The list was so sweet it hurt, largely because I wasn’t ready to quit drinking. The list felt too much like rules, which I don’t like as much as possibilities, and I stored it in the top drawer of a dresser I rarely opened, but I kept it. Of course I kept it.

There is a show on Broadway called Every Brilliant Thing. I learned about it when Michael Barbaro, #12 on this list, brought Daniel Radcliffe onto The Daily podcast to discuss the show, in which he was then starring (Tracee Ellis Ross is currently in the role).

The show originated in 2013, written by Britain’s Duncan Macmillan as an audience-participation-heavy experience, and its gimmick turns out to be profound: a character enumerates the good things in life to lift the spirits of a depressed mother.

“The list began after her first attempt,” the show begins. “One. Ice Cream. Two. Water fights!” I watched the play on HBO, when it starred English comedian Jonny Donahoe. I tend to shirk from audience participation, but I loved this, which made the participation seem less like randos singled out for embarrassment and more like everyone was building a story together.

I’ve been keeping lists as long as I can remember. Here’s one scribbled on a pad I keep near my kitchen counter: “One. Buy flight/hotel. Two. Dry cleaners.” Lists render the chaotic world into a simple 1-2-3, and the older I get, the more I need the visual reminder, the tactile sensation of scribbling, particularly with pen or pencil, which encodes memory better than typing. (This is science.)

Preorder The Only Thing There Is to Want

Listing things is, of course, time-tested. Ten Commandments, 95 Theses. Julie Andrews sang about “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.” (But not cats? Pfft.) Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is probably the best pop music example, though I can think of others. Blink 182 told us about “All the Small Things,” which apparently included leaving roses by the stairs and “always, I know you’ll be at my show.” In 2012, a collection of advice columns by Cheryl Strayed called Tiny Beautiful Things came out, an assemblage of writing so life-affirming I still recommend it to friends struggling with depression or big decisions.

The other day, I listed things I love on the Notes app of my phone, which contains many lists. (Grocery: “One. Nic gum. Two. Protein shakes.”) The following 20 items — in no particular order, because hello, Wallace is #11 — tumbled from my fingertips so fast I could barely keep up. This list is not complete, not even close, but I hope it inspires you to make your own.

The world is filled with bad news. It takes discipline, but precious little effort, to remind ourselves of every brilliant thing.

Share

1. McDonald’s Diet Coke

2. The smell of gasoline

3. Christmas lights year-round

4. The scratch of a needle hitting a groove of vinyl

5. Old-fashioned cigarette machine, seen in the wild

   

6. Rollerskating rinks

7. Peanut butter and chocolate

8. Any man who reminds me of Tom Waits

9. Sitting in a movie theater, especially in summer, and especially when it’s empty

10. Paul Thomas Anderson films, especially the ones about love

    

11. Waking up to find Wallace snuggling beside me

12. “I’m Michael Barbaro, and this [dramatic pause] is The Daily.”

13. The sound of a Zippo lighter opening and igniting with a flinty scratch

14. Wisteria vines in full bloom

15. ‘70s supergraphic stripes

    

16. When a hot jam hits a key change, and when they add hand claps, I’m a goner

17. The word “deciduous,” because it contains all the seasons

18. Breakfast tacos (bacon egg cheddar preferred)

19. Childhood photos of a man I love

20. Any dress worn by Marilyn

Back in my mid-20s when my friend sent me that list, I knew it was an act of love, written with the fragile hope that she could give me something I badly needed but could not give myself. Sadly, that rarely works.

Still, it’s worth trying — especially if the person who needs the list is you.

Your turn now. Tell me your favorite things in the comments.

Leave a comment

If you’re a man who loves women (and hasn’t given up on figuring them out), a woman who loves men (despite trends toward the opposite), a human who loves love, a sensitive soul who believes in the power of a new crush or an old flame, the quiet wisdom of cats, the tidal pull of nostalgia, the spooky phenomena of Carl Jung’s synchronicity or Freud’s repetition compulsion — I spent eight long years writing a memoir about how love and its loss can shape a life, how to balance freedom and connection, and how growing older forces a reckoning with the choices you made and the ones you never got.

TL;DR: I wrote this book for anyone who needs it.

Preorder The Only Thing There Is to Want

Writers love me! (At least so far!) Early responses:

Podcaster/writer extraordinaire/longtime book critic Walter Kirn on Twitter:

THE Lena Dunham in her Substack, Good Thing Going. (Dunham’s Famesick is the best memoir I’ve read in ages, and I claimed that before this published.)

Share

Tom Waits did not make this list. No Beatles, no ELO, no Old 97’s. You have no idea how painful this was for me, and all I can say is that some artists write so many classic love songs that ONE never quite rises to the top. I tried to be thorough, but of course this list is arbitrary. No Billy Joel? But I’m a proud Billy Joel defender! No Wilco? This is bullshit! I know, I know.

I indulged myself with bonus tracks. You’ll find a playlist at the end of this essay, and I encourage you to fall into the rabbit hole of wanting, haunting, exhilaration, romantic flashbacks, perfect harmony, and imperfect couplings. For the record, I believe a song of lost love is also a love song, which means that most of Taylor Swift’s canon was eligible, which made paring down this list VERY HARD.

The following songs are not ranked, but they were selected with tremendous care.

Preorder The Only Thing There Is to Want

“God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys

Back in my day as a music critic1, this was the #1 answer to “what’s your favorite song,” proof that even the most cynical rock critics are, at heart, total softies. Lush AF, direct in its poetic vision — “God only knows what I’d be without you” is the central conceit — it’s the love-song masterwork.

“Fuck It I Love You” by Lana del Rey

Lana is that rare pop priestess who can pull off the art-monster vibe. “I like to see everything in neon. Drink lime green, stay up ‘til dawn,” she tells us in the opening lines, and I envision her staggering around a low-lit Brooklyn lair with a cig and a plastic cup of God knows what, wearing some dude’s oversized shirt. (That may be the video.) This entire album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, is a work of art about the conflicted female heart not soon to be rivaled.

“These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding

Best slow dance ever?

“Silver Springs” by Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac’s more popular “Landslide” is one of the best break-up songs, but “Silver Springs” ushers us straight into the haunting. Stevie Nicks in that witchy alto, singing to her ex Lindsay Buckingham, coolly playing the guitar beside her onstage (at least in my mind): “Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me. I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me.” The build-up at the end is epic. That tumbling piano, the crashing cymbals, and Stevie in her raw-throated gypsy madness: “You will never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.” Shivers.

“Wonderwall” by Oasis

Don’t care if this song overplayed, it still contains my favorite couplet in pop music: “Because maybe — you’re gonna be the one that saves me.” Hopeless wish, beautiful folly. I’ll sing along with this one till the robots dump me in my grave.

“Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen

Close to a perfect song. Bruce opens by setting the stage. “The screen door slams. Mary’s dress sways.” OK, we have the visuals, but what’s the action? “Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.” OK, but what are the stakes? “Roy Orbison’s singing for the lonely. Hey, that's me, and I want you only.” This is short-story songwriting that gives you a universe in four and a half minutes.

“Whatsername” by Green Day

A song that feels like a literal blast from the past. The wall of sound near the end spikes my adrenaline each time. “I made a point to burn all of the photographs” our narrator assures us, but he can’t stop running into his lost love — on the street? in his dreams? She’s fled his life but never his heart. Billie Joe Armstrong is a wickedly underrated songwriter, and American Idiot is one of the great albums of the aughts.

“Daylight” by Taylor Swift

Tay-Tay has written so many killer love songs I’ll have to write an entire essay about it (coming soon), but if I’m forced to choose — today, because the answer might change tomorrow — I’d offer this album ender from Lover, which caps off with a mysterious audio clip of Swift telling someone (an interview subject? her producer? a friend?), “I want to be defined by the things that I love. Not the things I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night. I just think that … you are what you love.”

“Vampire” by Olivia Rodrigo

More like Pop Opera of the Damned than Top 40 jam, this is a triumph of songwriting, vocal performance, and emotional build. Our narrator is a scorned young thing seeking revenge on the man who wounded her. “Bloodsucker. Fame fucker. Bleeding me dry like a goddamned vampire.” The lyrics have a fairytale/nightmare quality, which is appropriate, since those mythologies grow like kudzu vines around women’s love stories and strangle them.

“Please Please Please” by The Smiths

If you don’t understand this melodic little gem of a song, then I don’t understand you. And that’s OK, because I can still love you; I’m just sad for you now.

I compiled a Spotify playlist of my favorite love songs, and I gotta say, it’s a banger.

Think I’m wrong? Fight me in the comments. I love a good debate.

Leave a comment

Bonus tracks: “Ol’ 55” by Tom Waits, “Lovesong” by The Cure, “Come Pick Me Up” by Ryan Adams, “Valentine” by the Old 97’s, “Maybe I’m Amazed” by Paul McCartney, “Night Swimming” by REM.

Editor’s note: I plan to add all the songs Love Anyway subscribers named in the comments to my intro essay — Otis Redding! ABBA! Billy Bragg! — but I got hijacked by life this week and will have to do that at a later time. Keep checking the playlist. I promise to add those soon, and if I don’t, someone needs to light me up in the comments, because it just means I’ve forgotten.

Critics love me! (At least so far!) Early reviews:

“Hepola’s prose consistently spins ordinary circumstances into gold; every interaction is scintillating, every scrap of dialogue witty. This bittersweet account offers a tart and intelligent assessment of the tussle to find lasting love.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The prose is precise even when it’s taking risks, unexpected turns of phrase landing with the ease of a friend talking you through her worst nights. A brilliant autopsy of loves lost.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Preorder The Only Thing There Is to Want

I was ten years old when I got a crush on the members of Duran Duran that was so intense it felt like a fever. At first I loved Nick Rhodes, the most feminine of the group, with all that makeup and the Flock of Seagulls hair, but eventually I settled on the bassist, John Taylor, a man so handsome he still looks good in his mid-60s. Great bone structure, tall and lean. (And think about the drugs this man did!)

He’s a great bassist, too, not that I cared, but later men I loved would explain to me the intricacies of the “Rio” bass line, inspired by ’70s funk. I can hear it now, but back then it was irrelevant. My friend and I used to tell each other stories about how we’d meet him, very analog fan-fic: You, with the frizzy hair and the jean jacket in the third balcony of Reunion Arena. I only want you.

Crush is both noun and verb, and it’s funny to contemplate how different the meanings, how twinned the intensity. To have a crush is sweet and silly, but to crush something is to demolish it. I think they have more in common than people realize. I was crushed by my crushes. They crushed me, but in the most exhilarating way.

I had been a cuddlebug from the jump, a sweet and burbling little thing who loved to be held and, when I was old enough to stop being held, loved holding things. A Raggedy Ann doll, a Winnie-the-Pooh, a plastic frog. There is a picture of me at two and a half holding a pull-string wooden dog like a snuggle bear. It took me years to notice this detail in the photo: that a little girl given a weird European toy to play with would still hold it to her chest like a promise.

My mother was my first love, because that’s the way of the world, but especially when you have my mom: Long lustrous black hair, clear and dewy skin, the most soothing alto voice. I still remember cuddling with her on a big king-sized bed in the room she shared with my father, and the comfort we had with one another’s bodies. How I could pet her silky black hair, how she would run a finger down the slope of my nose, tap the tip.

Around the time I got to kindergarten, she went to graduate school to get her masters in social work, and eventually she became a therapist. The way she tells it, she arranged her schedule so she could be home as much as possible, and the way I saw it, she was gone all the time. My father is a quiet loyal engineer who likes to watch news and football on the couch. He is one of the best men I know. Ask him for help with math homework, ask him how to get from point A to point B, but cuddling? That was mom’s deal.

I don’t know how crushes work, but I see them like a shifting energy field. When the object of the crush is removed, either by chance or choice, a new object arises to take its place. The energy needs some place to go. My first crush, at least this is the story told, was my cousin Chris, a cute and kind seven-year-old. I was about three. He lived in Michigan, and my family still lived in Philadelphia, and during one of our visits, my mother had me sit beside him on the couch for a picture. Except I was so overwhelmed by his proximity, as the tale goes, that I couldn’t stop crying. It’s like the toddler version of a superfan meeting the Beatles.

When I was about four, my family moved to Dallas, where we rented a two-bedroom house in the city’s best school district.

At first, I shared the second bedroom with my older brother, and his collection of GI Joes, but eventually my parents converted a utility space into a pink and red shrine to Strawberry Shortcake, a vapid cartoon figure of no personality or consequence (she made shortcake?), but I adored that little imp.

My room filled with stuffed animals: a furry pig, a blue teddy bear, a brown teddy bear. My mother came in one night and found 20 stuffed animals in bed with me and told me, in her gentle therapist-in-training voice, that I could only choose one. It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do — place 19 orphans on a shelf, the Sophie’s Choice of my childhood, and before the lights went out, I told each of them that I didn’t love them any less. I’d choose them each another day.

I had crushes on boys at school, too. The president of our senior class began his rise to the top as a darling towheaded boy in my kindergarten class who was also nice — very cousin Chris, version 2.0 — and you can still, to this day, find this scrawl on the side of my bedroom drawers, “I love Stewart,” which was not how he spelled his name. This pained me so much that in high school, I crossed it out and wrote “Stuart.”

All the girls loved Stuart, though he was vaguely attached to a sweet brunette named Beth Ann for much of our elementary school years, or maybe it was a sweet blonde named Betsy. The point is that Stuart was taken, but at night, I could snuggle with the animals and dream of the day in high school when he would be class president and I would be homecoming queen (keep dreaming, kid).

Those stuffed animals. I missed them when I was gone. I was probably in second grade when I started getting an allowance, and I’d scheme about the stuffed animals I could buy at the toy store in the mall. There was a fuzzy seal with velcro on her hands so that a baby seal was nestled in the mommy seal’s arms. I wanted this furry seal duo more than I can explain. It was probably my ultimate fantasy: That a mother and a daughter would never part.

I spent a lot of downtime in my pink and red bedroom. My brother Josh had exiled me around the time he was 12 and I was 8. Getting my own room was amazing, but I didn’t understand it also meant my own private island. My father took care of us in the evenings, and my father is good at many things, but “How was your day, honey?” is not his bag.

So I created my own companions. Stuffed animals became friends and interview subjects. I never had an “imaginary friend,” but that’s only because I understood the conversations I had with the empty space across from me to be in my mind. I was making this up. But it felt real. I still remember the cool wave of relief when I walked into that room, closed the door behind me, and returned to the universe of play-pretend I’d created.

By fourth grade, I became obsessed with the TV show Fame, and I acted out the scenes using the show’s soundtrack, which I had on vinyl. There was a guy among the cast of characters who wanted to be a stand-up comedian, apparently that was an area of study at New York City’s high school for the performing arts. Carlo Imperato is the actor’s name. I wanted to be his girlfriend and then his wife, and we’d live together in a house with at least three bedrooms, and he’d tell me jokes as I laughed.

I never did get that husband or three-bedroom house, but I’ve dated my fair share of comedians.

I hit puberty before anyone else in my class, not a competition I was trying to win, but I think the hormones and the shapeshifting of my body amplified whatever was going on in my head and heart. The Duran Duran crush proved the first flickers, but then came a conflagration.

I loved boys so hard it was nearly painful, like a need to pee. Tom Cruise in The Outsiders and Risky Business, Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid, Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. How could a girl choose? I used to buy those Teen Beat magazines, and I was smart enough to know this was embarrassing, so I carried them around like a boy my age might carry a Playboy, and in the privacy of my bedroom, I cut out the pictures and placed them on my wall till every square inch of Strawberry Shortcake was covered with the faces of boys, a hundred pairs of eyes staring at me like I was being pierced from all sides.

The boys I loved have become something of a carbon-dating system. Rob Lowe was sixth grade, River Phoenix was seventh, and somewhere in middle school, I turned on the television and saw Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street, and I was a goner. Johnny Depp was a crush I carried with me until the Captain Jack Sparrow years. Basically, as soon as he became mega-popular, I was out, but until then: Cry Baby to Edward Scissorhands to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? I was pulling so hard for Johnny, who came from a troubled background, as you may know.

Don’t worry. I could fix him.

I got my first boyfriend in high school, and we were best friends and play partners, and he’s still one of the coolest guys I’ve ever dated. A good snuggler, for sure. I call him Miles in Blackout, because he became a professional musician (a bassist), and I can blame him for my knowledge of Steely Dan and Primus and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, though he also introduced me to Elvis Costello and David Bowie and The Cars. I really did love Miles, who was the funniest guy in our high school. He was voted wittiest guy in our senior class poll. Then again, I was voted wittiest girl, mostly because I’d stolen his jokes.

I was distressed to discover my crushes didn’t exactly go away when Miles and I found true love. They slipped into hiding. I got crushes on guys in the senior play and the musical (obviously I was a theater kid). When I stopped wearing giant sweaters to hide my outsize knockers, I became hot for the first time in my life. The sexual power of a teenage girl is a social threat nobody knows what to do with, including teenage girls. I wound up cheating on Miles with a handsome troubled guy in The Grapes of Wrath cast. All we did was kiss, but Miles suspected as much and confronted me, and I couldn’t lie, so that was that.

We broke up a week before prom, and I already had my dress, but Miles told me he wasn’t taking me, so I went alone, which would prove a pattern. I have become very good at walking through the world on my own.

I came to college with a Winnie-the-Pooh nightlight and a thirst for domestic lager, another girl-woman at the University of Texas in Austin.

Later, when I read in Lena Dunham’s first memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, that she was such a cuddle monster in college she slept in the same bed with girls and boys, I was repulsed by this detail, probably because I was so envious. I had no idea that was allowed!

I had learned to swallow my need for cuddling — in part, by drinking a lot and then weeping over boys who didn’t love me back. My first college crush was a Billy Baldwin lookalike, an intellectual who wore a fedora to buy us beer with his older brother’s ID. He read Ionesco and played chess. I had a knack for choosing the guy that all the other girls liked but couldn’t get. Watch me. And he and I did make out a couple times, but he was madly in love with a raven-haired beauty who’d spent the previous semester in a mental institution, very Girl Interrupted. But I still see that crush as a success. He introduced me to whiskey, and Tom Waits, and clove cigarettes. I wasn’t great at getting love back — but I got so many other things.

I moved off-campus with my friend Tara, an aspiring journalist who became the editor of our college newspaper, and ours was the party pad. I still had fantasy boyfriends: random guys I saw on campus, playing with hacky sacks, or yet another cute-smart guy who was part of my theater group, one more intellectual smoking a Camel filterless. But I still got crushes on famous men, too. In my junior year, I went bananas for a stand-up comedian who had his own show, and I made everyone watch it. They liked him, but not as much as I did. I was nuts for that guy, who wore mock turtlenecks and had a ’90s spray of bangs and eyes set at an interesting angle. His name was Jon Stewart.

I got a real-live college boyfriend for about six months, and it was grand, but I spent most of my college years in longing, honing my skills as a third wheel and drunk-dialing men I’d messed around with.

It was the ’90s, and college was entering its hookup era, which would blossom in the aughts, so there was a lot of tumbling into bed after dark. When I think of my after-dark behavior in those years, I remember that photo of me as a toddler, clutching a wooden pull-strong dog to her chest like a snuggle bear: You deal with what’s on offer.

I was 28 when I fell in love with a big orange tabby named Bubba. He used to curl on my chest when I was napping during the day, while my live-in boyfriend was at work, the hours I was technically “writing.”

The love I felt for that cat was atomic, and it’s only in retrospect I understand I had reached a good age to have children. At the time, I thought I was too young (rimshot, please), by which I mean I had not yet accomplished what I wanted in my career. I wasn’t ready to leave the party barge. My relationship was solid, but it never felt like enough — and whether the relationship was flawed or I was impossible to please became the subject of arguments with my live-in boyfriend, the so-called father of Bubba. But then he broke up with me, two and a half years in, and I told him I was moving to New York City, and I was taking his cat.

I moved to New York City, where I lived for six years. I found many things in the Big Apple — killer parties, challenging work, great pizza, MANY crushes — but never love. Not in that city. I quit drinking at 35, and thank God I had Bubba the cat, because I don’t know how I would have made it through that lonely season without him.

I stayed away from men during the first year of my sobriety, with the exception of my coworker Thomas, a handsome gay man who worked with me at Salon, and my college buddy Bryan, a handsome married father who went to movies with me in the evenings. I got this enormous crush on the barista at the coffee shop around the corner from work. His name, of course, was Johnny. He had tattoos and a pageboy cap, and one of the guys at work gave me a pep talk about how to ask him out, but that was never the point. I didn’t want Johnny, who was a stranger, I wanted the promise of future romance, I wanted to know when I was finally ready for that kind of closeness, a man might be there.

I used to be embarrassed by how crush-prone I was. So girlie, so cliched. Bump into me in the elevator in some funny way, and boom: We’re on. I’ve come to find this aspect of my personality a beautiful outgrowth of my storytelling impulse, my urge to love, my need to hold and be held. During all those years I didn’t have someone to share my bed or my life, I created my own companions.

I still get random crushes. They come out of nowhere — small at first, an inkling (who’s that guy?) and then, HUGE. Sam Rockwell. Jacob Elordi. Oscar Issac. Sometimes I think those men remind me of men I’ve loved. They return me to that hunger and yearning during a stretch when I don’t have the time, or the opportunity, for a real-life version.

I’ve come to be grateful for my crushes. They keep me going. They keep me wandering and dreaming. Crushes are the reminder, in the end, that you’re alive.

Please tell me in the comments, because I’m dying to know: Who was your first celebrity crush?

Leave a comment

Crush-havers, past and present, you can pre-order my memoir The Only Thing There Is to Want, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or your local indie bookstore.

Share

It look me a long time to realize—to admit—I was writing a memoir about love. Isn’t that kind of … basic? The cool girls are over love these days, and most of my friends have been married for years, which means they’re also kind of over love, in the sense that they’re decades away from the part of the tale where they nuzzle in a cozy booth, lovedoped on the smell of their person’s skin. My friends are in the part of the tale where so-and-so watches sports in his armchair, and who the hell drank the orange juice, and don’t forget we have that thing on Friday.

My married friends sometimes joke they wish they had my life (no husband, no kids), but I am way past the “romance with my own empowerment” stage of singlehood, having been stranded here much of my life: table for one, too many vibrators, emergency contact = mom. I’ve long felt ambivalent about my singlehood. On one hand: Easy, efficient, lush with adventure and quality streaming television. On the other hand: Lonely, financially precarious, quiet in a way that can be luxurious at times and empty at others. It’s impossible to know what we’ve lost and gained in the bargain of our own choices. And while we’re on this subject, are they even choices? How much of life is luck, timing, circumstance? How much is fate, destiny, kismet? Life is not a pull-down menu. We don’t get to DoorDash the perfect relationship.

“You haven’t had a chance to be disillusioned by love,” a friend told me once. She’s married, in case you hadn’t guessed, but long before she was married, she was practical and responsible in a way I never could manage. She balanced her checkbook. (She looked at her checkbook.) She skipped college parties to stay home and study, while I … did not.

I am a hopeless romantic, and I wonder sometimes if that’s why I’ve never been married, because marriage—an institution I believe in, by the way—is kind of a romance-killer, or at the least it is a great challenge to romance.

The times I got closest to marriage, I could either sense the romance would fade in a way I’d find boring and stale (my late twenties), or I was so hoodwinked by the fantasy the other person participated in that I was shocked when it ended (my early thirties).

On September 29, my second book, The Only Thing There Is to Want: A Memoir of Three Loves comes out. It took me roughly eight years to write, as I tried to figure out if the chronic single hood I’ve wrestled with for much of my adulthood is a gift, or a curse. An opportunity, or a mistake. A life passage, or a life sentence. As I ask in the book’s opening section: Did I do this—or did it happen to me?

Maybe I choose unavailable men. Maybe I choose men who are available—for deep discussion, crashing escapades, epiphanic discovery—but not available in the traditional sense of marriage and commitment. Is that enough? Could I make it enough? By signing up for that thrilling but time-limited love, am I missing out on the sturdier and more enduring kind? Or! Maybe the kind of love I’m searching for isn’t available in captivity, a wandering fire that can only be chased.

People like to ask a question of women like me: “What do you want?”

But isn’t it obvious? I want everything: Love and freedom, thrill and serenity, deep attachment and unshakeable independence. I want to be loved uncommonly, and I want to be left alone. I want to travel the world, caress every corner, and I want to snuggle in bed with my cat, watching Succession (again). I’m very American in that way, in that expansive sense of endless curiosity and hunger. One of the best opening lines of a pop song ever written comes from Tom Petty:

Well, she was an American Girl, raised on promises

She couldn’t help thinking that there was a little more life, somewhere else.

It’s my belief that part of the profound anger, resentment, and disappointment among my cohort of women is that we simply have too many choices and no way to prove that the choices we made were right, no way to measure if our unhappiness is a reasonable part of adulthood or a shit sandwich we’ve been served thanks to capitalism, social media, the tyranny of hormones and gender roles, men being MEN, political something-something, I could keep going.

Near the end of Gail Collins’ book on feminism, When Everything Changed, she talks about a study showing that “as women have gained more freedom, more economic power, they have become less happy.” She frames this as a lesson in expanding opportunity. “Great expectations give birth to great disappointments,” she writes. Once upon a time, a young woman could be a teacher, a nurse, a wife, a mother. That about covered it. Now she could be … Beyoncé!

The space between what women want and what we get has grown canyon-sized, so of course we wind up crestfallen, and meanwhile (this part is my critique), there’s no uniformity amid our group, few shared grievances. When I meet female friends for brunch, we are married, we are single, we are divorced, we are childfree, we are stay-at-home moms, we are working full-time jobs only to head home and make dinner. Who got the deal? Who got the shaft? Nobody tells you these things. There is no answer key at the end of this book.

The Only Thing There Is to Want is a book about love, the most powerful drug known to man, and while it’s not an addiction memoir, it’s written by a woman with an addictive personality. I go hard. For readers seeking a similar ride to Blackout, there will be: emotional messes, mountains of Kleenex, arguments with therapists, men and questionable decisions, scenes of pre-sobriety drinking and post-sobriety mental obsession, and of course, cats. For those looking for a new jam, there will be: riffs on skin care and Tinder, pouts over middle age, tough questions about whether to have children, and a constellation of ways to look at love, the world’s greatest unsolved mystery.

PREORDER THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT

My hope with this Substack is to explore some of these themes in a way that illuminates The Only Thing There Is to Want without stealing its light. I also plan to flex my inner Chuck Klosterman, and a few essays you can look forward to include:

• Cuddlebug: A personal history of crushes

• Love Connection to Love Island: Dating shows I have known

• Why Lena Dunham’s Famesick is the best memoir I’ve read in ages

• Taylor Swift is one of the world’s great songwriters, fight me.

• Xanadu, the most underrated soundtrack of all time

• The best five movies about love

• The best five books about love

• The best five listicles about love (but I kid)

I also want to explore: the nature of attraction and desire, the complications of feminism, how gender relations got so rotten in the 21st century, the interplay between what we want and what we need, what we thought we wanted and what turns out to be the wiser path. I’m not convinced many of us know, in the end, what we want.

Thank you for being here anyway.

And before we part: What’s your favorite song about love? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

Smoking Diaries

On my podcast , I have this weird habit of chain-smoking before the sun rises and blah-blahing into a voice memo about how (and why?) this memoir took eight years to write. I’ve posted four solo episodes so far. Start with Smoking Diary #35: How NOT to Write a Book, followed by episode 36: Writing in the Age of Cancel Culture part 1 and part 2 and my latest, episode 38: Writing While Broke.

Critics love me! (At least so far!) Early reviews:

“Hepola’s prose consistently spins ordinary circumstances into gold; every interaction is scintillating, every scrap of dialogue witty. This bittersweet account offers a tart and intelligent assessment of the tussle to find lasting love.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Fans of Blackout will recognize the same fearless honesty and propulsive readability. The tone is so casual, so conversational, that it’s easy to miss just how good a writer Hepola is: The prose is precise even when it’s taking risks, unexpected turns of phrase landing with the ease of a friend talking you through her worst nights. A brilliant autopsy of loves lost.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Subscribe now