Media
Mandy Len Catron at Google Talks
Mandy Len Catron joins us for the latest edition of our "Modern Romance" series. Catron is the author of the new memoir, How To Fall In Love With Anyone, which stems from her wildly popular Modern Love essay in the New York Times, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This." She popularized
TED: Falling in Love is the Easy Part
Did you know you can fall in love with anyone just by asking them 36 questions? Mandy Len Catron tried this experiment, it worked, and she wrote a viral article about it (that your mom probably sent you). But ... is that real love? Did it last? And what's the difference between falling in love and staying in love?
TED: A better way to talk about love
TedTalk - In love, we fall. We're struck, we're crushed, we swoon. We burn with passion. Love makes us crazy and makes us sick. Our hearts ache, and then they break. Talking about love in this way fundamentally shapes how we experience it, says writer Mandy Len Catron. In this talk for anyone who's ever felt crazy in love, Catron highlights a different metaphor for love that may help us find more joy -- and less suffering -- in it.
URL: https://www.npr.org/2017/06/25/534286476/the-call-in-your-questions-about-making-relationships-last
For this week's Call-In, Mandy Len Catron, author of the new book How to Fall in Love with Anyone, answers your questions about love and relationships.
URL: http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/the-next-chapter/segment/15377988
Mandy Len Catron on her book about relationships, and the cultural myths of romantic love.
To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This
The New York Times, January 11, 2015Print
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html
One of the most popular NYT articles of 2015.
It's Time to Reimagine Consent in our Romantic Lives
The Guardian, August 5, 2018Online
Often we talk about consent in terms of power: who has it and how are they wielding it? What if we thought of it in terms of attention?
How to Fall in Love with Anyone
by Mandy Len Catron
Simon & Schuster
June 27, 2017
1501137441
An insightful, charming, and absolutely fascinating memoir from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” (one of the top five most popular New York Times pieces of 2015) explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy.
What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.
In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.
In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.
Biography
Originally from Appalachian Virginia, Mandy Len Catron now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Rumpus, and The Walrus, as well as literary journals and anthologies.
She writes about love and love stories at The Love Story Project, and she teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her article “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This” was one of the most popular articles published by the New York Times in 2015. How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays is her first book. It was recently long-listed for the 2018 RBC Charles Taylor Prize and short-listed for the KOBO Emerging Writer Award. Her TED talks have been viewed more than five million times.