Jenna Bush Hager’s February 2025 Read With Jenna book is perfectly in synch with the month’s vibe.
“It’s February, which means it’s the month of love, and I have the best, most epic love story for you to fall in love with this month,” Jenna says.
“This Is a Love Story” is Jessica Soffer’s second novel, which follows her 2013 debut, “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.”
Changing perspectives and switching between eras, “This Is a Love Story” tracks many years in a marriage between Jane, an artist, and Abe, a writer, and the lives their relationship touches.
“In this beautiful book, we meet Abe and Jane who, upon the end of their life, are recounting their love story as a way to keep their memories alive,” Jenna says.
“We find out both the beautiful things that tied them together, but also the more difficult ones that threaten to tear them apart. This is a book about marriage and devotion,” she continues.
Jenna also points out another notable “character” in the book: Central Park. Soffer weaves in many shorter love stories throughout, as she imagines who might be walking through the park. “If you want to fall in love with New York, pick up this book,” Jenna says.
Speaking to TODAY.com, Soffer says “This Is a Love Story” is meant to highlight the complexities of a long-term relationship.
“This is a Love Story” by Jessica Soffer
“It’s a happy marriage — reciprocal, respectful, compassionate. But life is hard, and love is hard, and so I tried to offer up the truths,” Soffer says.
In her initial draft, Soffer only wrote about Abe and Jane, starting with them meeting as young artists and throughout her long battle with cancer.
“I thought it was going to be this small, very insular novel that was going to sell nowhere, but was going to be hopefully beloved,” she says.
Then, she started to feel that the story was “myopic and narrow.”
“I started thinking about the ways in which any love story doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s supported and complicated and challenged by other relationships, in certain cases, other loves,” Soffer says.
Eventually, the novel started to become bigger, incorporating the perspective of their son Max, “who has a very complex relationship with love and believes that his mother chose art over parenthood,” and a woman named Alice, “who tries to kind of get in the middle of Abe and Jane.”
There is “a little” of her parents in “This Is a Love Story,” Soffer says, while the details are distinct. Her mother is a writer and her father is an artist.
“My father was ill for a long time. My mother took care of him, and I didn’t know the intimacies the way I knew about Abe and Jane, but there was a certain level of imagination — of maybe, this is what it’s like,” Soffer says.
While the title may suggest that Soffer was infatuated with love, she says that wasn’t the case.
“It started as a book that was very much about illness and two people kind of trying to survive illness and to make love last despite illness, but it wasn’t specifically meant to be about love,” she says.
She came to feel that love was the center of the book.
“I hope that readers wonder about the role that love plays in their own lives and the way that that’s so essential. It keeps us alive,” she says.