"The Love of my Life" by T.C. Boyle is a story about two teenagers that are completely infatuated with each other. Boyle chronicles one year of their lives together and how drastically circumstances changed for them. In doing this, he uses the third person point of view which I thought was more than effective. The narrator was able to bounce in and out of the heads of the two main characters, China and Jeremy. I liked the way these two characters changed throughout the story. Boyle inserted so much conflict in their lives, I felt extremely uncomfortable reading it. However, the idea of having unprotected sex and hiding the pregnancy is a very a real one. Every year this sort of thing happens. Boyle used this real subject matter and wrote it in such a way that the reader could almost sympathize with the protagonists. Several times reading this I had to stop and be grateful I wasn't in the shoes of the characters.
The imagery was outstanding. Not only did Boyle take advantage of the graphic nature of this story to describe some very gruesome details, but he also paid attention to smaller aspects. For instance, I loved the description of Jeremy's exhaustion on page 144:
"He'd never been so tired, his head on a string, shoulders slumped, his arms like two pillars of concrete."
Though the ending of this story made sense, I did not think it was fair. If Jeremy were to go to jail, which I think was just, I wanted China there, too. She seemed to be the reason that the baby was not born in a hospital, because she insisted that they ignore the problem. However, Boyle stayed true to reality. The fact that bad lawyers do exist, loopholes in the justice system are real, and life isn't fair, made the ending appropriate.
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