Thoughts and Impressions

· This book is definitely an emotional rollercoaster, it made me look at relationships differently. While reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, I learned that relationships can be complicated, lovely, beautiful, emotional, heartbreaking, and even scary (especially if your best friend is a murderer). Relationships are so dynamic, change over time, and sometimes relationships end so that new ones can begin. This book made me reflect on my relationships too. There are both good and bad aspects to any relationship, however, this book made me realize that relationships can be what we base our lives on. We attach ourselves to the people we hold dear in our lives and go through the motions because of the relationship we have with a specific person. We put ourselves through a lot due to the people we have relationships with.

· Each story that I read in the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is so unique and different in its own way when speaking about love. The first story of the book Why Don't You Dance? starts out by introducing two types of couples, one who is starting out in a relationship and one who is in the process of ending a relationship. This is the basis of how the book looks at relationships as a whole and up to the end of the book, we see that not all relationships have happy endings, and are confronted by the fact that all relationships end. In the final story "One More Thing," they display a relationship ending between spouses and so the wife evidently kicks out the husband from the house because she is tired of his shenanigans. I have to say that my impressions from the first story to the last story stay the same because these are realistic depictions of relationships- they do not have to end well or sometimes they do, but all relationships end at some point or another.

· One story that really stuck with me was called Everything Stuck To Him because out of all the short stories in the book this one might have been the most touching. This story is about a couple who are in love and by the age of seventeen had gotten married and had a child together. While there was something wrong with their baby, the boy made a decision between going hunting with his friend or staying at the house to help his wife. He made the choice to stay which displays the maturity and responsibility he has to his family. This story shows the triumphs of being young and in love!

· The story that confused me the most was called I Could See The Smallest Things because I found it hard finding out what this story was supposed to symbolize in regards to love and relationships. This story touches on the friendship between the neighbor and the main character's husband and how they decided not to continue their friendship after a drunken dispute. The neighbor seemed really upset and torn over it. During the story when the neighbor wanted to show the infestation of slugs in his yard to the wife confused me as to their significance.

· The experience that I got from reading Carver's book compared to a lot of novels I've read in the past is that the writing in this book can be a little hard to understand sometimes. I saw myself going back and re-reading sentences to better understand what the author meant when he was talking about love. I don't usually read this genre of short stories but this book really opened my eyes.