From the wards of New Orleans to the cornfields of Iowa to the slopes of Colorado, from the raves of Los Angeles to the hollows of Appalachia and the canyons of Wall Street, Americans talk about love. Tortured teenagers, free-spirited octogenarians, anxious Navy wives, blue-blooded bohemians, horny-but-chaste pastors, and multiply-partnered cosmopolitans tell extraordinary tales of broken hearts; sexual infidelities; improbable reconciliations; hidden, forbidden, preposterous love; and endurance against all odds. These are America’s real love stories—wise and foolish, comic and tragic, full of surprises and straight from the heart.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Reviving the format of his 2001 Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, author and journalist Bowe surveyed Americans of all ages and backgrounds for their thoughts on romance. Beginning with the prompt, "Please tell me about the person you have loved the most," each interview illustrates love as unique to its beholder. Love strikes one respondent in a rehab center, another during a crystal meth binge, another in the killing fields of Cambodia, another in the aftermath of divorce; love also proves its dominion over class differences, natural disasters (like hurricane Katrina), disease (like Alzheimers), and even death. While the more dramatic stories will likely stick with readers longest, plenty of accounts chronicling the deep, gentle bonds of long-lived romance, or the intense burn of young love, strike satisfying chords. Bowe allows each of his subjects the space to tell their stories, and each one proves compelling in itself, while showing that love is indeed a many-splendored (and many-splintered) thing, hard to pin down and often unexpected. Though timed conspicuously for Valentine's gift-giving, this hard-to-put-down take on love is surprisingly substantial.
Review
“In Us: Americans Talk About Love, John Bowe uses first-person accounts to uncover the incredible range of human experiences with love . . . No aspect of lust, greed, need or devotion is ignored . . . It is as compelling as literary fiction . . . but it also functions as a kind of self-help manual, forcing readers to examine their own longings, failings and assumptions about love. —Julie Scelfo, The New York Times
“Bowe and his colleagues interviewed people with backgrounds and experiences as wide-ranging as the country is diverse, and whittled those dialogues down to short stories told in the subject’s own voice . . . It’s a dream book for anyone with a respectable sense of voyeurism.” —Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post
“In Us: Americans Talk About Love, author John Bowe presents 44 firsthand stories—hideous, hilarious and ultimately hopeful—from the likes of teenagers, sex workers, Amtrak conductors, immigrants and octogenarians. Every day is Valentine’s Day in this profound, touching work of social anthropology.” —Los Angeles Times Magazine
“Journalist John Bowe and his coeditors jack us with uncanny directness into the Great American Eros—and in some cases the Id . . . This gaggle of voices from all walks of life will have you giggling, crying, and muttering to yourself in alarmingly rapid succession.” —Ben Dickinson, ELLE magazine
“Funny, brutally honest, quirky, devastatingly painful, and hopeful all at the same time. Every story is a small movie I wish someone would make.” —Judd Apatow, writer, director and producer of The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Funny People
“It’s interesting reading this volley of love stories. One finds oneself comparing one’s own great love to each of these couples, thinking, ‘Oh, we’re a much better couple than them,’ or, ‘Gee, they seem to know a few things I don’t.’” —Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life
“A new engrossing book, comprised of compelling interviews with ‘average’ everyday Americans, all about the great loves of their lives. The book resembles a great work of literary fiction…I opened it up and got sucked right in.” —Maura Kelly, MarieClaire.com dating blog
“Unlike the typical anthology filled with essays by familiar authors, Us offers love stories by nonliterary types, told in their own voices . . . Editor John Bowe takes the pulse of American experiences of love won and lost . . . Although Bowe claims to have no special expertise on the subject, he’s quite articulate in describing love’s endlessly surprising nature. —Carmela Ciuraru, The Christian Science Monitor
“The literary version of a box of chocolates from your sweetheart . . . a Valentine’s gift made to last. You could read one short, sharply edited story per day, just as you could pick one chocolate a day from your 2-pound heart-shaped box. But not every tale in this oral history is sugary-sweet . . . Some of them are beautiful. But many of them are painful—even if only with the bittersweet twinge of an unrequited first crush.” —Louisville, KY/Southern Indiana Courier-Journal
“[A] novel and fascinating approach to the problem of writing about love.” —Glamour.com daily dating blog, “Single-ish”
“I love love, in all its permutations—gritty, glorious, courageous, clumsy, brutal and beautiful. US: Americans Talk About Love is the wisest, frankest, most entertaining book on the subject. The extraordinary stories in these pages illuminate the absurd wonder of the ever-hopeful human heart.” —Isabel Gillies, author of Happens Every Day: An All Too True Story
“This amazing book made me think of Walt Whitman, who asked ‘Who speaks of miracles? I know of nothing but miracles.’ Like the best of Studs Terkel, the detail and power of the voices in these pages remind us that a kind of miracle is unfolding every day, all around us.” —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“[The] stories are amazing. Quirky, moving, despairing, transcendent. Not prisoner to fashion.” —NPR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook”
“Stirring, humorous, altogether addictive.” —NBC New York
“Oh good God this book’s a dazzler . . . Like the best oral history books . . . Us reads totally unmediated slash natural and, therefore, mildly voyeuristic—you’re a few lines into each chapter, each person’s individual story, before you realize two things: 1) how much you want to know what happens next, and 2) how unwilling you’d be, if you were just a stranger sitting next to that person, to ask . . . Read it now.” —Weston Cutter, Corduroy Books
“If there’s an overriding theme to this book, it is of love’s enormous power—to push, prod, change, humiliate, thrill and infuriate . . . Taken together, these stories are almost overwhelming in their emotions—betrayal, depression, giddiness, confusion, fury.” —Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune
“While the more dramatic stories will likely stick with readers longest, plenty of accounts chronicling the deep, gentle bonds of long-lived romance, or the intense burn of young love, strike satisfying chords. Bowe allows each of his subjects the space to tell their stories, and each one proves compelling in itself . . . This hard-to-put-down take on love is surprisingly substantial.” —Publishers Weekly, [Starred review]
“Fun and interesting . . . Following the tradition of oral historian Studs Terkel . . . each respondent provides an honest and deeply personal view into the passions and foibles of love … reads like a compilation of short stories.” —Library Journal
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Finding meaning in Us,
By literbug (New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Us: Americans Talk About Love (Paperback)
I found Us to be a surprising and compelling read on several levels. A number of publications have highlighted the particularly dramatic and counterintuitive love narratives Bowe includes in the book. As such, I assumed I would approach Us as a perusal, eyeing the intriguing introductory quotes that launch the 44 interviews before choosing what to read.
However I soon found myself pulled into the conceit that gives Us its organizational structure. In arranging chapters by the duration of the subject's love experience, Bowe implicitly asks us to consider how time shapes the meaning we assign to love. In reading the book, as I ultimately did, it in its printed order, I found myself wondering whether length matters in matters of the heart. Bowe begins with a pre-schooler contemplating her weeks-old love for a boy who shares his toys with her. The book concludes with stories of couples who have endured the trials of time and reaped the unique benefits of a romantic love spanning fifty or more years. Between these extremes, Us introduces a set of experiences of varying lengths, each so remarkably diverse that one is left with the poet's question: Can the word love have shared meaning? Through Bowe's tactful editing, the reader hears the voices of men and women facing the impossible task of putting language to such experience. The interviews are always surprising, especially when they reveal the ways love can bring out the most strikingly unloving behavior. Perhaps even more surprising, however, are the interviews that remind us love is not always surprising. Bowe concludes, after years of interviewing and editing, that he is now more perplexed by love than when he took on the book. I reached the same conclusion. However he does suggest that one distinct theme emerging from this ambitious project. Namely, men and women who struggle to define and explain love in its early its early stages differ dramatically from those who talk about love in its maturity. If there is any lesson in this book--any benefit to hearing everyday voices on such a strongly-felt feeling--it must be found somewhere within this mysterious distinction.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An unexpected page-turner,
By rouxbe t (Brooklyn NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Us: Americans Talk About Love (Paperback)
Each story in this book is a little gem. Some are sad, some are happy -- all kinds of people speak, in an astonishing variety of voices which in some mysterious way build upon each other the more you read. I knew I was interested in the book but I didn't really anticipate it being such a page-turner -- I couldn't wait to get back to it and read the next story. And reading them, you really do get an ever-so-slightly clearer idea about what love is. This would make a good valentine's day present.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sweet, Smart, Fascinating,
By Jenny I. (Toronto, Ontario) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Us: Americans Talk About Love (Paperback)
I so loved this book. It's like getting to see straight into the heart of America--or the many hearts of America, for one of its strengths is how very different and utterly compelling each one of the stories that are included here is. They're at times heartbreaking (the woman whose ill lover sent her away), other times astonishing for what they show about the depths of human strength and compassion humans (the same woman, whose new lover holds her while she cries), but together they renew your faith in life's vast possibility. I can't imagine anyone not liking this book, except for the black hearted or bitter.
I just have to add, I really don't get the sour remarks of the reviewer who took exception to the inclusion of a drunken street person in here. I kind of loved that the book has him--if you live in New York, you pass street people every day and never stop to think what they're thinking or feeling. The fact that the author does and included the feelings/thoughts was kind of genius--by doing this, he humanizes what to many people are inhuman. And the remark about how "one basic task that quotes should do in any story - prove the writer's point with the voices of the people he/she interview"--but the book wonderfully lets the subjects speak for themselves. That's one of the delightful things about it: it doesn't impose the writer's point of view. And finally no point to the book? Yeah, yeah, tell it to William James, who didn't particularly have one either in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," where he set out to explore how individuals themselves perceive their own religious experiences. To say the book doesn't have a point is to overlook the fact that, taken together, the voices form a rich, beautiful fabric. And maybe that's the point.
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