How to Love
A surprisingly sincere collection of advice about love and relationships which knows when to be funny and when to be serious.
This book covers a range of topics, from being single to falling in love, to a happily ever after or dealing with a breakup. Each topic is broken into questions which each span a couple of pages of comic, each one ending with a punchline in a panel on its own page.
I borrowed this from the library because I like Alex Norris’s work, and I enjoyed how sincere it was. I thought perhaps a graphic novel about love might lean too hard into humour, but it walks the balance. There are plenty of visual gags, but the core message is serious and grounded. (Perhaps I should be less surprised than I am; they also strike that balance with webcomic name.)
I enjoyed the visual narrative as well – we follow the same bulbous-headed protagonist throughout, and there’s a cast of secondary characters who come in and out of the panels.
My favourite part was the comic about gender roles, which conveys the breadth and diversity of gender without using any of the stereotypical gender markers. The abstract style shows the absurdity of insisting on traditional gender roles.
Favourite quotes and panels
On page 18 the character combines two question marks to make a heart, which I found delightful.
Page 27 is the first time I’ve heard an explanation for “you have to love yourself if you want somebody else to love you” that doesn’t treat it as something that’s self-obvious:
Loving yourself means you will have more in common with those who love you.
Page 129 explains how relationships don’t have to follow a set path, in a nice set of panels where the characters leave a flat and sterile bridge in favour of a walk through a wooded, outdoor area:
You may feel pressure to go as fast as possible, as though you have somewhere to get to, rather than enjoying the journey and making a path of your own.
I love this line from page 143 about cultivating relationships beyond your Beloved:
New love doesn’t have to come at the expense of old love. Life is always more than one story, and you can be part of many adventures.
When describing breakups on page 203, the character buries half their jagged heart in the ground, which grows back as a tree made of jagged hearts:
You may want to simply get rid of these feelings and put the whole thing behind you, but feelings we try to bury away tend to grow into something more.