A Q&A about love with the author of Point Click Love.
Point Click Love is Molly Shapiro’s fun and sexy debut novel. Four women try to sort through the wild and complicated world of text messaging, status update and other high speed connections.
Best friends and fellow Midwesterners Katie, Annie, Maxine, and Claudia are no strangers to dealing with love and relationships, but with online dating and social networking now in the mix, they all have the feeling they’re not in Kansas anymore. Katie, a divorced mother of two, secretly seeks companionship through the Internet only to discover that the rules of the dating game have drastically changed. Annie, a high-powered East Coast transplant, longs for a baby, yet her online search for a sperm donor is not as easy—or anonymous—as she anticipates. Maxine, a successful artist with a seemingly perfect husband, turns to celebrity gossip sites to distract herself from her less-than-ideal marriage. And Claudia, tired of her husband’s obsession with Facebook, finds herself irresistibly drawn to a handsome co-worker. As these women navigate the new highs and lows of the digital age, they each find that their wrong turns lead surprisingly to the right click and, ultimately, the connection they were seeking.”
February Q&A About Love…
Look what we owe to Shakespeare…
If music be the fruit of love, play ___________________________? (what would you most want to hear?)
“I Want You” by Elvis Costello. It’s a song about betrayal and heartbreak, but the music is so haunting, the lyrics so desperate—there’s something incredibly passionate about his single-minded obsession.
What is the greatest love prose you’ve ever read? Who wrote it? Please quote a few lines?
It’s not the “greatest,” but I love this passage from Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”:
“You guys have been together eighteen months and you love each other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But you both loved other people before you met each other. You’ve both been married before, just like us. And you probably loved other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us—excuse me for saying this—but if something happened to one of us tomorrow I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory.”
Is your imagination of love, your ability to write about it – greater than your experience?
I tend to write more about love’s failures than its successes. In my experience, true love brings peace, contentment, joy and passion. I do write about the passion part, but if I spend too much time on the contentment part, things get a bit boring.
Have you ever fallen for a character? Who? How does he or she compare to the real love of your life?
In high school I fell completely in love with Binx Bolling, protagonist of “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy. I pictured him as a young Gregory Peck, with jet black hair, prominent eyebrows, and a chiseled face that was as close to perfect as I could imagine. But what I loved most was how lost, tortured and searching he was. Now I’m older and wiser, and I have no interest in tortured souls. My real-life love is happy, optimistic and not continually searching.
What are the words that you can’t imagine ever being associated with love?
Resentment, envy, disgust, dispassion, indifference.
With a nod to Yeats – If “love comes in at the eye, how does it go out …. (please imagine the rest of this sentence)
Love comes in at the eye. If it’s true, it won’t go out until you die.
Does love have its own language?
Yes! But that language is different for each pair of lovers. Some express their love with acts of kindness—a dinner carefully prepared, a door hinge promptly repaired. Some with gifts. Some with a steady stream of affectionate words throughout the day. For me, the ideal is a combination of all three. A random act of kindness, a gift for no reason at all, and a well-timed “I love you” just when you least expect it.
