Review: Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

Author: Sarah Butler
Release date: January 31st 2012
Publisher: Picador
Hardcover, 256 pages
Source: Publisher for review
Buy: The Book Depository


Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love is so far out of my comfort zone that I had to take a train back, but it was definitely worth the trip. It is a soft, nostalgic story about a woman who is a bit lost but more importantly, who doesn’t want to be found. As the youngest of three daughters, Alice has a hard time finding her place in her own family. She also has a hard time staying in one place; she is a wanderer, restless by nature. It doesn’t take long for her to start feeling trapped so she travels the world to avoid it.

It is a lonely life Alice leads. Unable to create real emotional attachments, or rather prone to denying those she has created, she is a lone island surrounded by people she should be closest to. After spending six months in Mongolia, running from a dysfunctional family, a relationship that made her feel aimless and trapped, she receives the news that her father is dying and returns home.

Daniel is Alice’s real father. He is homeless, a different type of wanderer, but a wanderer nevertheless. He is, in part, homeless by choice; the life without attachments suits him. He refuses to leave the city, though, because that’s where he thinks Alice is, although he knows very little about her. For her part, Alice doesn’t even know that the doctor dying in their family home isn’t her real father. He was her mother’s husband, father of her two sisters, and he raised her as his own, even after her mother died.

I don’t even know what you look like. I don’t even know where you are. I tried to find you, you must believe that. I went to her house and rang the bell, but no one answered, and when I looked through the window, I saw the marks on the carpet, where the furniture used to be.

It wasn’t always easy being inside the head of someone so detached. In lack of her emotional responses, I’d try to assume what she would feel in any given situation and quickly become frustrated when Alice remained unchanged by this new experience. At least on the surface. There were some complicated feelings underneath, but she never reacted as one would expect.

It takes a lot for me to pick up a realistic novel, and even more if it’s literary fiction, but I rarely regret it in the end. That is the case with Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love. I loved the change, the maturity of it, I loved that it didn’t have a messy beginning and a clean ending. I loved the asymmetry of it, the nostalgia that poured out of every page. I loved that it was a quiet read, never melodramatic, complicated and yet so very simple at the same time. It made me want to step out of my comfort zone more often because I always come back a different, if not better person, and really, what more can one ask?