love’s labour
The Examined Life, the bestselling debut from psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, was about learning how to live; his new book, Love’s Labour, is about learning how to love
When it comes to love why do we find things so difficult? Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there?
In the intimate space of the consulting room, we meet the woman who can’t post her wedding invitations but then, decades later, can’t decide whether to get divorced; the friendship group that explodes when an adulterous affair begins; and the man whose partner’s death is almost too much to bear.
As an analyst, Grosz’s unerring ability is to locate what ails the heartsick, through hours of talking and listening. As a writer, he elegantly shows how we can deploy the agonies of love as tools for understanding.
The labour of love is the work of a lifetime but in finally learning to see ourselves and our world clearly, we find we are truly ready to love one another.
The Examined Life
‘This book is about change.’
We are all storytellers – we make stories to make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen.
In his work as a practising psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behaviour. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon.
This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work, and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to him as to the patient.
These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.
Reviews of “The Examined Life”
“The Examined Life … shares the best literary qualities of Freud’s most persuasive work. It is … an insightful and beautifully written book … a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks. [A] deeply affecting book…”
Michiko Kakutani — New York Times.
… Grosz writes with such artful self-effacement that his cases seem to speak for themselves. […] What makes The Examined Life so fulfilling is the way Grosz moves from case study to essay, from narrative to hypothesis, including the reader in each mental step.
Talitha Stevenson – The Observer (read the full review here)
“An elegant, unfussy writer, [Grosz] compresses years of analysis into short chapters that feel like minimalist, suspenseful detective stories. At the end of each story, a secret is revealed; often, it’s a secret which you’ve also kept.”
Joshua Rothman – New Yorker (read the full review here)