This Is Also A Love Story by Sally Hayden

TL;DR: Heartbreaking but somehow still hopeful
Source: NetGalley, so many thanks to the publisher!

Plot: These essays all focus on those impacted by tragedy, manmade and natural, and how resilient love can be.
Setting: This spans the globe and touches on everything from Japanese survivors of a tsunami to the Ukraine/Russian war.
Readability: Even with these being so hard, they’re easy reads for the casual reader.

Summary:

We live in an era defined by crisis—whether it be war and displacement, climate collapse and catastrophe, or the undercurrent of exploitation and corruption that profits from all of this violence and adversity. But in the midst of chaos, there are stories that reveal the strength of the human spirit. Celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed incredible love, hope, and resilience—powerful reminders that humanity can endure and rise above even the bleakest of moments.

In This Is Also a Love Story, Hayden captures these life-affirming moments that show the indomitable spirit of love and hope that persists even in the darkest times. Hayden introduces us to a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants, and to a group of Syrian women who have tirelessly sought justice for their missing loved ones. We see a couple on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and letters from the bereaved to the dead and missing, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan. Through these stories, which crisscross the globe, from Ukraine to Japan, Uganda to Lebanon, Palestine to Spain, she challenges us to see beyond despair and recognize the innate generosity and self-sacrifice that define humanity.

Hayden asks us to encounter this profound adversity not through a lens of despair, but through a prism of hope. In the process, these stories of deep fracture, and often violence, can instead be constellated through something deeper and more human than greed or the desire to love and be loved. This Is Also a Love Story dares us to look at the world through the innate generosity and self-sacrifice that can be found in even the darkest of times.

Thoughts:

This is the type of collection I had to take slowly. I would read one or two essays a day, then break and just sit with them, then move on. With 9 essays and an epilogue there was plenty for my brain to turn over. Each essay looking at love during or after tragedy doesn’t shy from the facts. From children to spouses and family who have gone missing or have been killed, we see people standing through that and finding ways to help or seek others.

A mother pretends to be a madwoman to keep soldiers from her children, former child soldiers returning home, an elderly man keeping a mailbox for people to send letters to the lost after a tsunami. This is the sort of thing you’re visiting with and sitting with. The trauma of war and natural disasters, but the healing of it.

There is also a look at how desensitized we’ve become. It’s easy to distract ourselves from the multiple tragedies around us because there are SO many. And with social media it’s so easy to get lost, and buried in sand. What do we do with that, how do we fix it and do we lean into the hope and love? I highly recommend this, but be prepared to feel everything.