Hard to Love

July 23, 2018
Hopper debuts with a smart group of essays on contemporary relationships. A literature scholar, Hopper cultivates a voice that is sophisticated and analytical, but also earnest and eager, and her strongest essays balance these qualities. In “Spinsters,” her treatise on female friendship, she shares fond memories from her life, such as of falling asleep to a friend’s voice on the phone, while decrying how the “arbitrary conflation of marriage with the commitments and responsibilities of adult life sometimes turns unmarried people into second-class citizens, while devaluing many necessary kinds of love.” Hopper also skillfully uses personal anecdote in a piece on how caring for a friend with cancer is both “the most adult thing... and the most adolescent thing,” because it requires negotiating health insurance policies, but also “willful wish-fulfillment” in the periods between treatments. Only rarely is she less successful, as in a disappointingly banal piece on “How to Be Single.” Much more often, she demonstrates how being deeply personal with the people in one’s life can help one to be critically engaged. “I think about writing and hoarding together,” she says, after describing the hoarders in her family, in that “so much has to be serendipitously discovered and rediscovered and collected and stored.” There is some to be passed over in these essays, but there is much more to be discovered.

Starred review from November 1, 2018
Love and yearning, independence and community recur as salient themes in this debut collection.In her first book, Hopper (English/Yale Univ.), a contributor to New York magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications, gathers essays notable for their intimacy and warmth. Raised in an evangelical family by "anxious, God-obsessed parents," the author and her siblings were home-schooled, with little exposure to TV, movies, and radio. "We shared a unique set of cultural references," she writes, "or perhaps a unique lack of them, which amounted to a secret language." In high school, she began boning up on popular culture and, gradually, assembling a "found family": people who "know you and love you for who you are--not for who you once were, or who you never were." Many essays meditate on varieties of sentimental attachments--to friends, lovers, and, in "Hoarding," to things. Hopper rejects the idea of a "hoarding disorder," which "pathologizes an entire deep-rooted orientation toward the material world, an orientation that constitutes my lifelong experiences of creativity, attachment, safety, and joy." Both hoarding and writing, she suggests, depend on what is "serendipitously discovered and rediscovered and collected and stored." In the lovely "Lean On," Hopper regrets that dependence is "despised in our culture, from psychology to politics," implying weakness and shame. Self-reliance, on the other hand, is extolled by Emerson, Joan Didion, Ayn Rand, noir novels, and most Westerns. Hopper begs to differ, celebrating the gifts of "shared daily life." Praise for community underscores her admiration for the classic sitcom Cheers, whose theme song, "Where Everybody Knows Your Name," seems to her "a kind of love song." Whether she is writing about her fraught decision to become pregnant with donated sperm, a friend's bout with cancer, baking ("a code for conveying care safely without the ambiguity of words"), the collective energy of the Women's March, or a visit to the Foundling Museum, Hopper's essays seem like love songs, as well: delicate, thoughtful elegies to friendship, compassion, and grace.A fresh, well-crafted collection.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2018
I blamed our breakup on Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing professor Hopper writes in Lean On, the stunner of an essay that opens this collection. The line sums up her book's central themes: love, literature, and philosophical musings. Though the collection can be uneven?some reprinted essays seem like filler?the best pieces offer smart and studied reflections on the power of friendship. Lean On uses Emerson, Joan Didion, and Gwendolyn Brooks to critique American culture's twin obsessions with romantic love and the cult of self-reliance and extoll the virtues of dependence on friends. In Dear Octopus, Hopper analyzes Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger's classic book of stories about the Glass family, alongside her own sense of kinship with her siblings, the combative religious community in which she was raised, and the family of choice she assembled for herself in her twenties and thirties. While families are bound by blood and couples often by the law of marriage, the bonds of friendship expand and contract over time. Hopper fervently embraces this and the rich intimacies it affords.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)