To be honest, this story gave me a panic attack when I read it for the first time. I’m already prone to them, but I was so horrified by “The Love of My Life” that it came over me involuntarily as I reached the story’s conclusion. I think one reason I was so affected because the depiction of Jeremy and China’s relationship at the beginning of the story sounds so similar to the relationship I have with my boyfriend. Like them, we go everywhere together, take vacations together, and display the same kind of sickeningly-sweet affection. I feel more comfortable sleeping on his parent’s couch than I do on my own parents’. So it pains me by parallel to see a happy, close couple, with their cocoa, camping, and poetic pet names, fall so far and so horrifically.
Yet at the same time, from the outset the reader, whether through pessimism or expectation of a typical plot structure, is waiting for the moment they begin to fail, the moment it goes wrong. The story foreshadows trouble even in an innocent night of movies, with: “They’d rented a pair of slasher movies for the ritualized comfort of them—‘Teens have sex,’ he said, ‘and then they pay for it in body parts’—and the maniac had just climbed out of the heating vent, with a meat hook dangling from the recesses of his empty sleeve, when the phone rang.” Sooner or later the mania must, and will, emerge, and a nightmare becomes reality. Jeremy and China are so terrified and immersed in each other that they end up ignoring the reality of their circumstances and becoming the “breeders” they so detested.
I loved the language of this story, as it heightened the details of the couple’s world, like the “otherworldly drumming of pellets flung down out of the troposphere,” making it all the more heartbreaking when it falls apart. I pictured this couple like Toulouse-Lautrec’s series of two young lovers, most famously 1893’s In Bed. A girl and boy tucked deep in a bed gaze sleepily at each other, a smile fading on the boy’s face. The scene is cozy and affectionate but looking at it now, I feel a sense of unease. Are these these figures too young to be locked in such a passionate embrace? If the perspective was changed, would we see a smile on the female figure’s face, or would she have the same fading sliver of a smile? Do they love each other? I wish I knew. Or maybe now, I wish I never will.
Yikes! Sorry about the panic attack. So . . . it sounds like you think he took a very realistic, typical teenage romance but, through the action and characterization, pushed it far beyond that to make it story-worthy. You're right about the foreshadowing, which is needed in a story like this to add suspense and keep adult readers interested. Good comments. I'll look forward to hearing more in class.
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