Love's Work

Love's Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents' divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends' tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete--to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge ("I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs," Rose writes, "My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers") and with unsettling wisdom ("To live, to love, is to be failed"), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.… (more)

Media reviews

Full Stop

The republication of Love’s Work (sixteen years after it was released to great acclaim) should not be taken as an attempt to acquaint a new generation of readers with guides for living from a very smart and insightful woman. Rather, we should celebrate this republication for calling forth a

seriousness that is still imperiled by the pressures of society.

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New York Times

The risks that Ms. Rose has taken here pay off handsomely. At once forthright and stylish, her book makes very old questions seem fresh.

User reviews

LibraryThing member ainjel

This is a book that I feel like I need to read over and over again to fully understand it. Rose speaks of her life, and the connection between love and death. I have her philosophy book that I have just started to tip-toe into, and I look forward to seeing the connections and dialogues between the

two texts. A nuanced book, skillfully told and raw. Absolutely wonderful.

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LibraryThing member mahallett

just not that interesting.

LibraryThing member stillatim

Based on this, and her fidelity to philosophy and reason while the rest of the world was so fixated on theory and irrationality, Gillian Rose is more or less a saint to me. So I cannot write an objective review.

LibraryThing member jphamilton

This book was originally released back in 1995 and has gotten many glowing reviews since then. Gillian Rose was a noted philosopher from Britain who had decided to write a philosophical memoir of her life and her approaching death from cancer. She focuses on the power of love during many different

and trying times in her life. It was understandably quite moving at times, but mostly I didn’t feel that I was connecting with her writing. Her sections about philosophy seemed rather distanced and cold. While the more personal parts about cancer and her medical treatments—other than a few very intense pages—also seemed distanced. Maybe I was expecting too much from an older book, as these types of nearing-death memoirs are much more common nowadays, but this book seemed to be something she was reporting on, and not as much of something she was personally feeling.

In the end, she died before the book was published. There are some seriously gory details about her surgeries, where she had much of her intestines removed, as well as a hysterectomy, and a number of other serious surgeries. I have read a number of these nearing-death memoirs, and they are obviously one of the hardest kinds of books in which to achieve the right tone, but Love’s Work seemed to be something that Rose wanted to keep some distance from. Because I think about death so much, I can imagine writing such a book myself, but actually doing it still seems a staggering achievement. Gillian Rose was incredibly brave to write this book and I’m a fool to be critical of her, but I’m just writing what I felt as I was reading her words.

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