Chill Take, Book Review: This is a Love Story, by Jessica Soffer

This is a Love Story, by Jessica Soffer
Published 2025 | Contemporary Fiction

You remember . . . I remember . . . memory is its own character here.

From the beginning, Jane is dying. It's cancer that is killing her, and it has come back for a third time. There is really no fighting it now. In our house, we are against cancer. I don't usually like - am not even usually willing to read - books with cancer deaths. But this isn't a book about dying from cancer. Death is the frame, I think. A silent character. My PTSD therapist Stan (z"l) might have said, "the dog scratching at the door." Death sits with us as we sit in the swirl of memory on every page . . . as we sit with Jane and Abe as they remember their more than fifty years together.

I couldn't quite put this one down. I did at times, but even then I didn't. Being in this book is like no book I've ever been in before. This book is on the one hand a hospice vigil, but on the other . . . well . . .

When author Jessica Soffer (whose Jewish father left Baghdad in the 50s, fled through the Iranian mountains, eventually came to Ellis Island and never went back to Iraq because he had fake papers that said he was from Bahrain) was asked about the distinction between a love story and a romance, she responded, "One can really lose their head in a romance, but I think a love story requires some sense of the bittersweet and what happens after loss or how love is earned. That’s what interests me the most–the redemptive quality of love and coming through something, sometimes with someone and sometimes all alone. A love story contains all kinds of other stories: a grief story, a sadness story, a hope story, a hope deserted story."

The foundation of this story is Jewish. There are moments when the waves "daven" (pray), or when someone is cooking, or when there is talk of a bris and it is clear that the Jewish culture of the story is in its weave. Jane's mother is Jewish and from Iraq . . . or was. She's already dead before this story begins. Jewishness is culturally assumed, but not an obvious part of the story.

The telling is tender.

It matters that Jane and Abe live in New York.
Central Park is also a character more than a setting.

Jessica Soffer wrote love.