Review
“A delightful, giddy novel. . . . [Pearson] finds those universal chords, the stuff of great novels.” —Los Angeles Times
“What I Don't Know How She Does It did for working mothers, I Think I Love You does for every woman who’s gone through life with an idealized notion of love. . . . An entertaining, thoughtful story that women of any age can relate to.” —The Oregonian
“It was impossible not to be captivated by this romantic comedy.” —Chicago Tribune
“Pearson writes with such humor and affection for her characters. . . . Combines effervescence with earnestness, a finely tuned sense of absurdity with nostalgia, satiric wit with genuine warmth.” —The New York Times
“Anyone who ever swooned over the pages of Teen Beat will delight in the premise of I Think I Love You. . . . Offers comedic relief of the highest order.” —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“[A] funny, tender novel about first love—and whether we ever really grow out of it.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Pearson renders teenagedom with authenticity and poignancy. . . . Lovely.”—The Washington Post
“An absolute hoot. . . . Another gem.” —Newsweek
“I Think I Love You will have special resonance for baby boomers who experienced the early 1970s as young teens. . . . But Pearson’s empathetic portrait of Petra transcends the era, as does Petra’s tender recollection of her first, unobtainable love.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Pearson grabs 1970s nostalgia by its weepy, pop-culture heartstrings in I Think I Love You, an homage to teen crushes. . . . Sweetly told.” —USA Today
“[Petra] is the beating heart of the story, quick with nostalgic references and the bewitching, heartbroken thrills that come close to the urgency of first love.” —The Daily Beast
“Capture[s] the heady intensity of a teenage crush. . . . If you were a David Cassidy fan yourself, you may find that the book is enough to fuel a trip down memory lane.” —The Boston Globe
“Pitch-perfect. . . . Insightful, funny. . . . A tasty and surprising stew. . . . Hits the right notes.” —The Plain Dealer
“If you’ve ever been a teenage girl, you know exactly how the desperation feels and maybe understand why it was so hard for me at the age of 48 to restrain myself when Cassidy walked by. If you don’t understand the phenomenon, read Pearson’s book for some entertaining insight.” —Catherine Mallette, The Dallas Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Petra has a piercing wit and a boundless charm, but it’s Pearson’s insights into friendship, celebrity worship from the inside out, and the knocks you take in life that create a winning novel of hope, lost and found.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Read this if you remember plastering your walls with your idol’s posters, singing along with the radio or screaming at a concert. . . . Whimsically sweet.” —Newark Star-Ledger
“Flawless and funny. . . . Manages to inhabit the tricky territory of the adolescent mind so convincingly that you can almost hear your own teenage self speaking.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Too young to have saved your Friday nights for The Partridge Family? You’ll still enjoy this insightful story about how our youthful passions shape who we become.” —People
“[A] deceptively sparkly book. . . . Does for the pop crush what Nick Hornby has done for football and vinyl, but Pearson, the voice of a generation of frazzled women who think perfection is within their grasp, has added something extra to the mix.” —The Sunday Times (London)
“Charming.” —The New York Post
“Reading this book made me remember what it was like to be in love. . . . This book is about big things—friendship, motherhood, love, loss—seen through the prism of smoke from a joss stick, set to jingly jangly music that still makes the hair on the back of the neck stand up.” —Liz Jones, Evening Standard (London)
“Pearson knows how to capture emotion, from adolescent infatuation to grownup devastation.” —The Miami Herald
“IThink I Love You . . . delves deeply into celebrity obsession, adolescence and motherhood. . . . Anyone who has ever loved a celebrity they’ve never met will appreciate this book.” —Bookreporter.com
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Allison Pearson, an award-winning journalist and author, is a staff writer for the London Daily Telegraph. Her first novel, I Don’t KnowHow She Does It, became an international best seller and was translated into thirty-two languages. She is a patron of Camfed, a charity that supports the education of thousands of African girls. Pearson lives in Cambridge with her husband and their two children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
9781400042357|excerpt
Pearson: I THINK I LOVE YOU
1
His favorite color was brown. Brown was such a sophisticated color, a quiet and modest sort of color. Not like purple, which was Donny’s favorite. I wouldn’t be seen dead in purple. Or in a Donny cap. How much would you have to like a boy before you went out wearing a stupid purple peaked cap?
Honest, it’s amazing the things you can know about someone you don’t know. I knew the date of his birth—April 12, 1950. He was a typical Aries, but without the Arian’s stub?bornness. I knew his height and his weight and his favorite drink, 7Up. I knew the names of his parents and his stepmother, the Broadway musical star. I knew all about his love of horses, which made perfect sense to me because when you’re that famous it must be comforting to be around someone who doesn’t know or care what famous is. I knew the instrument he learned to play when he was lonely. Drums. I knew the name of the dog he left behind when he had to move away from New Jersey. I knew that when he was a boy he was small for his age and he had a squint and had to wear an eye patch and corrective glasses, which must have been hard. Harder than for a girl even. I didn’t wear my glasses if I could help it. Only in class for the blackboard, though I couldn’t see well without them and it got me into trouble a few times when I smiled in the street at total strangers I mistook for members of my family. A few years later, when I got contact lenses, I was stunned by the trees. They had leaves, millions of leaves, with edges so sharp and defined they looked like God had made each one with a pastry cutter.
Basically, before I was sixteen, the world was one big Impressionist painting, unless I screwed up my eyes really tight to bring it into focus. Some things, as I would discover, were best left a blur.
Back then, I wasn’t interested in the real world. Not really. I answered my parents’ questions, I gave the appearance of doing homework, I lugged my cello into school on my back, I went downtown on Saturday afternoons with girls who sometimes felt like friends and sometimes didn’t, but I was living for Him. Each night, I spread my long dark hair out on the pillow and made sure to sleep on my back so my face was ready to receive a kiss in case he came in the night. It wasn’t that likely, obviously, because I lived in South Wales and he lived in California, which was five thousand miles away, and he didn’t even have my address, although I had once sent a poem for him to a magazine. Choosing the right color paper took longer than writing the actual poem. I settled on yellow, because it seemed more mature than pink. I thought all the other girls would choose pink and part of loving him was finding better ways to please him so he would know how much more I cared. They didn’t sell brown writing paper or I would have used brown, because that was his favorite color. Sometime later—three weeks and four days if you’re counting, and I definitely was—a reply came in the post. It was seventeen words long, including my name. It didn’t matter that the letter said they were sorry they couldn’t publish my poem. In some crucial way, I felt as though I had made contact with him at long last. Someone important in London, someone who had been in the same room as him, had touched the yellow paper I had touched and then typed my name on an envelope and licked the stamp. No rejection slip has ever been more treasured. It took pride of place in my scrapbook.
I knew exactly where he lived in California. In a canyon. A canyon was like one of our valleys, only much bigger. We said much bigger. David said way. Way bigger. Way was American for much. America was so big that Americans would drive one hundred miles just to have dinner with someone and they didn’t think that was a long way to go. In America, way to go means you’ve done something well. Way to go, baby! And they have gas instead of petrol.
Other words I had learned were cool, mad and bathroom. You have to be careful because a bathroom is not a bathroom in America, it’s a toilet.
“The Americans are a most polite people who are not standing for vulgarity,” said my mother, who was German and beautiful and disapproved of many things. You might say that my mother’s whole life was a battle to keep the vulgar and the ugly at bay. In our town, she had found the perfect enemy. I just liked knowing American words because they brought me closer to Him. When we met, it would be important to retain my individ?uality, which was one of the top things David looked for in a girl.
In every interview I had read, David said that he preferred a girl to just be herself. But to be honest with you, I was unsure of who myself was, or even if I had one, although I still maintained a touching faith that this unknown and as yet undiscovered me would be deeply appealing to David when we eventually met. How could I be sure? The understanding in his eyes told me so. (Oh, those eyes. They were deep green pools you could pour all your longing into.) Still, I reckoned that meeting David would be awkward enough without any unnecessary confusion, so I did my best to pick up American. It would be tricky to go to a bath?room in his house in Los Angeles, for example, and find there was no bath, wouldn’t it? Or imagine saying someone was mad. David would think that I meant they were angry. Crazy means mad in America. Back then, I couldn’t imagine David ever being angry, he was so gentle and sensitive. Sorry, do I sound mad?
“Donny Osmond’s a moron,” Sharon said firmly. She was kneeling on the floor, picking at the staples in a centerfold with her thumbnail, trying to free a male torso. The slender, headless body was naked to the waist and practically hairless, except for a fine golden down just above the belt, which boasted a heavy bronze buckle. It looked like the door knocker to an Aztec temple. Sharon eased the poster off the frail metal pins until it rested on her hands, trembling a little in the hot air blowing from the small heater beside her. Sharon’s bedroom was small, painted a sickly shade of ointment pink and reeked of burned hair, a bad cotton-candy smell that got in your nostrils and stayed there. Sharon had dried her hair in front of the heater and a few strands had gotten sucked into the back, but we didn’t really notice the smell, so absorbed were we in our work.
“I don’t think Donny’s a moron, to be honest with you,” I said carefully.
“All the Osmonds are morons. I read it in a mag,” she insisted, without looking up from the poster. Sharon was an expert restorer. The best artist in our class. When she grew up she could probably get a job in a museum or an art gallery. I loved to watch her work. The way she rolled her tongue into a little tunnel when she was concentrating and applied her attention to the tiny puncture holes in David’s stomach, soothing the torn paper with her fingertips until the flesh appeared to seal up.
“There you go, lovely boy,” she said, and placed a noisy smack?ing kiss on his belly button before adding the poster to the pile.
There was a prickle in my throat like a piece of trapped wool. I badly wanted to correct Sharon about the Osmonds’ being morons, but our friendship was still too new to risk disagree?ment. We liked each other because we agreed. We agreed because we both thought David Cassidy was the most wonderful boy currently alive and maybe in all of human history. At thirteen years of age, I couldn’t imagine the luxury of having a friend you could disagree with. If you disagreed with her, you could fall out. Then, before you knew it, you’d be back out there in the playground by yourself, sighing and checking your watch every couple of seconds to indicate that you did have an arrangement to meet someone and were not, in fact, the kind of sad, friendless person who had to pretend they were waiting for friends who did not exist.
Even worse, you could find yourself entering into anxious negotiations with some other borderline outcast to be your partner in PE so you didn’t have to be in a pair with Susan Davies—Susan Smell, who had a disease of the skin no one could spell. Her face, her arms and her legs were all cratered, like the surface of the moon, only some days the holes were filled in with the chalky dust of calamine lotion. We knew exactly what it was because our mothers dabbed the lotion on us when we got chicken pox. The angry, itchy spots were like tiny volcanoes around which the soothing pink liquid hardened into a tempting lava crust. Mustn’t pick it, mind, or it would leave a scar. The worst thing about Susan Davies, apart from the way you felt really sorry for her but still didn’t do anything to help her, was the stink. Honest to God, Susan smelled so bad it made you retch in the corridor when she went past, even though she always walked on the side with the windows.
“Donny’s a Mormon. I think it’s a religion they founded in Utah,” I said cautiously, trying the sounds in my mouth.
Ooh. Ta.
I knew exactly what Mormons were. Donny Studies were part of my deep background research on David. I knew everything about the other Osmonds, too, just in case, even Wayne. At a pinch, I could have given you the star sign of every member of the Jackson 5, and details of their difficult upbringing, which was in such contrast to their carefree, joyful music. Twiddly diddly dee, twiddly diddly dee. Twiddly diddly dee. Dee dee!
You know, I can never hear the opening chorus of “Rockin’ Robin” without a spasm of regret for what became of that remarkable little boy and all his sweetness.
Even as a child, I had this overdeveloped taste for tragic biographical information, a sort o...
