Bookmarked: ‘One True Loves’ Flips the Script on a Happily Ever After

A happily ever after isn’t always followed by more love. Sometimes it’s a burnout, a slammed door after tears or a funeral procession with an obituary notice.

Especially during February, expectations of a happy ending with love can seem like a broken record, but Taylor Jenkins Reid plays the record backward. In her book “One True Loves,” Reid composes and conducts a symphony of words that doesn’t just tug at heartstrings, it yanks them — hard. 

Released June 7, 2016, “One True Loves” weaves a compelling story about love, anguish and hope through 352 pages. Reid has an uncanny ability to make literary fiction feel alive — her characters seem to truly breathe within the streets of Wilmington, N.C.

At the start, Emma Blair mourns her husband Jesse, who’s been presumed dead for three years following a plane disappearance. Reid crafts Emma’s heartbreak into a graspable portrait. Her grief seeps into the mundane, making the reader feel its weight in the smallest details of everyday life.

Traveling, drinking coffee, laughing while window shopping and smoking on rooftops become unbearable in Jesse’s absence. The visceral beauty of Reid’s writing shines through in these simple moments.

How can one live separated from their true love? For Emma, it manifested in a heart twisting depressive state, long sleepless nights and restless days filled with painful associations. The absence of love wasn’t just an emotional void — it was a tangible shift in Emma’s world.

Emma stopped booking flights for fun, as her desire to see the world ended the moment Jesse died. The woman who once wanted to leave her small town and explore big cities now barely steps outside, and her world shrinks to the size of her bedroom. 

But with all the heartbreak, Reid gives the reader a chance to explore the other side of pain — hope. 

Reid toys with the possibility love is fluid, existing in multiple forms across different phases of life, manifested through grief. 

“Just because something isn’t meant to last a lifetime doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be,” Reid writes. 

But Jesse returns to Emma’s life, one she’d rebuilt over three years with her childhood friend, Sam. 

Sam lends Emma a new kind of love, shaped by healing rather than history. Now Emma faces two lovers — Jesse, a husband she previously shared her life with, and Sam, who’s helped her relearn how to love living. 

“It’s a scary thought, isn’t it?” Reid writes. “That every single person on this planet could lose their one true love and live to love again?”

Reid doesn’t make Emma’s choice easy, proposing love isn’t a single defining experience but a possibility, a multitude of choices.

Reid crafts a love triangle in which both men represent different versions of Emma’s past and future — nostalgia and growth. The tragedy isn’t just in loss, but in the inevitability of pain. 

Reid’s powerful, heart-yanking prose cuts deep. Her words often feel like confessions readers have yet to articulate. While Emma is fighting her inner heart, readers grip theirs as they wait for her to choose — Jesse or Sam. 

Reid’s ability to capture raw, unpolished edges of love and loss with a smart tactic. She constructs her prose to feel intimate and universal. Many people experience love and heartbreak, and with Reid’s writing, their experience gets to be lived. 

Her writing is tender as it embraces the contradictions of the human heart. With visual and tactile imagery, Reid explains how the heart can ache, heal, shatter and rebuild all at once. Through her deliberate and emotionally charged dialogue, she crafts a story about a woman trying to find what it means to love. 

“One True Loves” differs from typical romance novels as there’s no singular, definite happy ending where the couples get together. No one really knows the conclusion —  Reid leaves it open for interpretation and gives the reader the agency to pick their own ending. 

“It’s messy to love after heartbreak —  it’s painful and it forces you to be honest with yourself about who you are,” Reid writes. “You have to work harder to find the words for your feelings because they don’t fit into any prefabricated boxes. But it’s worth it because look what you get: Great loves. Meaningful loves. True loves.”

“One True Loves” is available to purchase at all major bookstores.