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Loading... Love's Work (1995)by Gillian Rose
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  jphamilton | May 24, 2021 |    ) stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |  ) mahallett | Aug 2, 2020 | ) ainjel | Jun 20, 2019 |
 The republication of Love’s Work (sixteen years after it was released to great acclaim) should not be taken as an attempt to acquaint a new generation of readers with guides for living from a very smart and insightful woman. Rather, we should celebrate this republication for calling forth a seriousness that is still imperiled by the pressures of society. The risks that Ms. Rose has taken here pay off handsomely. At once forthright and stylish, her book makes very old questions seem fresh. Belongs to Publisher Series
"Love's Work is at once a memoir and a book of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and endurance of love, love that becomes real and endures through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents' divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends' tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete--to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self knowledge ("I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs," Rose writes, "My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers") and with unsettling wisdom ("To live, to love, is to be failed"), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions."--Provided by publisher. No library descriptions found. |
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Wikipedia in English
In the end, she died before the book was published. There are some seriously gory details about her surgeries, where she had much of her intestines removed, as well as a hysterectomy, and a number of other serious surgeries. I have read a number of these nearing-death memoirs, and they are obviously one of the hardest kinds of books in which to achieve the right tone, but Love’s Work seemed to be something that Rose wanted to keep some distance from. Because I think about death so much, I can imagine writing such a book myself, but actually doing it still seems a staggering achievement. Gillian Rose was incredibly brave to write this book and I’m a fool to be critical of her, but I’m just writing what I felt as I was reading her words. (