It takes a certain sort of courage — or perhaps foolhardiness or chutzpah — to write a book about love. Hasn’t everything about it already been said? But perhaps it is part of the nature of love to appear perpetually new. Just as one feels, when falling in love, that no one has ever really loved before — no matter how many others have kissed, embraced and swooned — perhaps it is only natural to feel, when writing about love, that no one has ever really understood it the way you do. How else to explain the glut of conversation about love, the seemingly endless torrent of contemplation and comment regarding this “unruly emotion”?
If Lisa Appignanesi, who chairs the Freud Museum in London, feels any anxiety about staking a claim in this much-trod-over territory, the title of her book does not betray it. And to be fair, “All About Love” covers a lot of ground and draws on a wide range of sources. Psychologists, novelists, poets, historians, filmmakers, philosophers, social critics, interview subjects — all these and more get their say. The book is such a cascade of voices that Appignanesi’s own voice is sometimes hard to discern amid the hubbub. But her voice is clearest in the part of the book that I enjoyed most, the autobiographical opening chapter, which describes Appignanesi’s early experiences with love: seeing her mother sharing an obviously inappropriate embrace with a man who was not her father, watching movies like “Cinderella” and “Snow White” and wondering whether “it was animation that made kisses and love OK,” considering what it meant when the boys on the playground made lewd gestures.
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