Mixed Feelings About ‘Love Your Life’

What Sophie Kinsella’s 2020 novel can teach us about writing a romance or any love story. Spoilers included.

I love Sophie Kinsella. I do.

I love her books because she infuses them with quirky characters and situations that sometimes make me chuckle and forget about real life.

But then in Love Your Life, she wanted to write about real life, which involved getting her characters and plot to a course that’s believable. And here’s where the problem lies.

Originally published in Write and Review on Medium on August 21, 2024

In Love Your Life, erratic, wishy-washy Ava meets handsome Matt at a writing retreat. It wasn’t supposed to happen, because Matt had signed up for a martial arts workshop, but the latter folded and Matt enrolled in the only other class that was available.

This is at a monastery in Puglia, Italy, where everything, from the sunshine to the food, is idyllic, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the two of them find love there, especially as Matt fits Ava’s description of male charm — well, there are some glitches — and Matt is there away from all the stress of having to deal with his family and their company of doll houses — Harriet’s House — back home.

The book starts further back, however, with Ava chatting with her girlfriends Nell, Maud, and Sarika in London, where both Ava and Sarika are looking for partners. Sarika wants to do it by leveraging the power of online dating using filters in a most rational way — including by not accepting anyone living more than ten minutes away from the metro — while Ava is more old-fashioned, hoping to be surprised by life and its charms.

And, if her affair with Matt at the retreat is any indication, life does work its magic on Ava in a time-honored, in-person-meeting way. They both have a blissful vacation in Puglia. They’re two people who live in the present, without any baggage, in a stress-free environment — something that, perhaps, many of us are guilty of dreaming from time to time.

In London, Ava and Matt try to make it work as a couple, but as any novel worth its salt would have it, there are impediments. Matt’s apartment is really cold and cold-looking, he favors an art painting with a hairless dog in his bedroom, and at first, he’s having trouble accepting that Ava’s dog Harold likes to cuddle with Ava in her bed for part of the night.

There’s more. Matt’s parents are posh and finicky, whereas Ava is down-to-earth and more of a hippie at heart. Her apartment is full of rescued objects, not only furniture but also books no one, including her, will read. She’s also into aromatherapy and lots of color — in contrast to Matt, who’s more of a black-and-white and sharp-edges kind of guy, at least if you go by how he’s decorated his pad.

Looking at all this evidence, it’s hard to imagine how these two protagonists could form a solid couple, but the author asks us to believe that they will — to hold out hope for them because a chick-lit book Kinsella-style has to end on a very positive note.

In a typical manner for a book centered on a romance, we have competing love interests showing up on the scene, until this and Matt’s commitment to his parents and Harriet’s House are too much for Ava, who decides to leave for Puglia again, this time in order to finish her novel and, with that, iron out some of the flakiness in her character.

It all moves along as expected: the loop of the Puglia retreat is closed and crowned with success as Ava finishes her book, and when she comes back to London, both she and Matt are changed humans, ready to start anew and work out their differences from new emotional places. Matt has left Harriet’s House and, with it, his family’s yoke over his independence. He works now with his roommate and friend Topher, and, together with Topher and their other roomie, Niall, has made good friends with Ava’s squad of friends.

Structurally the plot is very tight, and even the twist at the end, with Harold being run over by a car and needing a prosthetic leg, is something that connects with Niall’s interest in robots — Niall is now considering turning Harold into a bit of a bionic dog. In terms of relationships, too, there are no loose ends. Everyone pairs up: Nell with Topher and Sarika with Sam, a guy she’s met online and who seems to be more than ideal, in that he fits all of Sarika’s requirements both on paper and in person. Maud is already married with kids, so she doesn’t need a partner, but she gets closer to Niall, who somehow seems to continue on being single.

It all seems possible, yet there are many instances in the book that collapse our suspension of disbelief.

First, when Ava meets Matt at the writing workshop and Matt offers to read something closely based on their steamy romance, he, of the posh family and public image of Harriet’s House, can’t find any smooth words to dress their sexual relationship and actually used the f-word as part of a very coarse piece he’s reading to the class.

As we’re only starting to learn about him, this read-aloud is funny, but plot-wise, it fails in two ways. First, it leads us to believe that he’s a boor, someone that will not be a good fit for Ava and is present in the story only to show us how naive she can be, falling for the most unrefined man ever, only to discover later on someone better suited for her. This, however, wouldn’t be a problem, since we expect stories to have twists and turns. But then when they return to London, Matt is completely different: a gentleman — in the best senses of the term — , even if one lacking in emotional self-management.

Their story in London is also peppered with contradictory behaviors. When Ava asks Matt what his parents are like, he thinks about it and then says they’re tall, first about one of them and then about the other. Yet when Ava comes back from writing her book in Puglia, he suddenly speaks several sentences at once — about everything, including his parents!

Moving on to Matt and Ava’s friends, suddenly, before Ava and Matt’s breakup, Topher and Nell get together as a couple (even as Nell won’t admit it). All this after we’ve been introduced to Topher as a very reclusive introvert, and to Nell as someone very private who will not mention her lupus struggles to just anyone. And yet, the first time they meet, Nell blurts out that she has lupus and Topher takes to her as if his hermit-like manner has just disappeared into thin air — he’s very available emotionally and open about his emotions in a way that suggests he’s just fallen for her. All after he describes himself as antisocial and has trouble even getting out of his room before Ava’s friends come to visit.

And then don’t let me nitpick on Kinsella’s story about Ava’s book. Ava is not a bookish person, we’re never told she reads or see her read, and yet she writes this fantastic memoir about her dog Harold that gets picked up by a literary agent right away — one who just happens to be in Puglia at the same monastery when she writes her book. And then Ava gets not only one book deal but a deal for two books, all for writing about Harold.

I mean, okay, we’ve all seen some writers making a splash with debuts, but, unless they are very famous — and, usually, older — , or with lots of important stories to tell in one area or another, they are not getting a book deal for a memoir, let alone a book deal for two books — and with a substantial advance.

But then this is chick lit and in the world of chick lit we have to believe that Ava can be successful writing about the antics of her dog. The world would be a better place if that were true, but unfortunately the competition out there for books getting published traditionally is beyond fierce.

And, again, the change arcs for some of the characters do a 180-degree flip, switching from one extreme to the other. For instance, Ava’s friend Maud, who asks everybody for umpteen favors, including when she first meets them, and in the first minutes of meeting them, suddenly turns into someone who helps others with their little tasks — returning the favor(s), as it were. That’s not how it works with people, unless they experience something incredible that truly changes their life, as if on a dime — but this doesn’t appear to be the case with Maud.

All this should not mean that the book is not enjoyable. Kinsella is a talented author and her style bounces with flair. The dialogue sections are perky, the characters are well-developed and fun to see interact, and the plot is centered on notions that, in true chick-lit fashion, fill a reader’s heart that needs warmth and humor and the strength to dream above the ramparts of dire reality.

And then I love escapist chick lit books, and I understand that it’s almost a requirement that they not be 100% believable, partly because life does offer plenty of twists and surprises, and second, because the suspension of disbelief is probably — surely — built into the genre.

But this book makes it abundantly clear several times that Ava, the erratic, bohemian young woman with a heart of gold is learning to live in real life. So that’s not exactly chick lit anymore. Our expectations change — we want to see her transformation, and that of her relationship with Matt, as mirroring reality, indeed. And it doesn’t reflect real life — which kills much of the pleasure of reading a book that wanted to go from chick lit to women’s fiction and in the process gathered only a veneer of the latter.

So much hinges on genre, doesn’t it? And, also, escapist literature is not what it used to be. And is the current fascination with memoirs changing the way authors write chick lit now, too? One has to wonder.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s post. I look forward to your comments!

To a happier, healthier life,

Mira