Book Review: All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps

 

All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps

Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps

This book is a wonderful, short collection of stories about love in many of its incarnations, sharing the stories of people from every age and many different walks of life.  They are true stories, transcribed from conversations recorded by StoryCorps, which records 40-minute interviews between family members and friends.

I first learned about StoryCorps when they helped facilitate the recording of stories surrounding the flooding of the city in which I work, back in the seventies, during the 50^th anniversary.

You can listen to some of the stories they have recorded here - https://storycorps.org/stories/

There are three parts to this book – Found, Lost, and Found at Last. The first part is very sweet – stories of how people found their partner, whether they are young or old.

There are stories of people who courted through cassette recordings, mailed to each other and played on a Walkman, and people who met because of misaddressed emails. It’s the stories that parents and grandparents tell their children and grandchildren about how they met. Sweet, simple, and heartwarming.

The second part of this book was so hard to read because my eyes were often filled with tears. It’s about love that has been lost. Sometimes the partner has died, from cancer or simply old age, and sometimes they just aren’t who they used to be, because of Alzheimer’s or something else. It’s beautiful and yet so difficult to read.

One woman said, “People talk about closure. There is no closure when you lose a loved one. I don’t care how you lost them, your heart is always open.”

The third part is more about how love was put on hold and then found once again, either because of circumstances or mindsets. It’s the fairy tale ending.

One of my favorite is Gwendolyn Diaz and Henry Flores. Henry says, when he saw Gwendolyn for the first time, “I saw a flash of ankle, and I saw these beautiful green eyes, and I saw this blond hair, and I went, Wow! And then I went smack dab into the wall.”

These are good stories, little snippets of people’s lives, beautiful. I highly recommend it.