Sometimes it takes being broken open to finally go looking for love. For journalist and author Alison Van Diggelen, that breaking came violently and unexpectedly — a terrifying encounter with a dog while hiking in Mexico that shook her to her core and forced her to ask questions she hadn't known she needed to ask. What emerged from that darkness wasn't despair. It was a book.
Alison is the author of The Love Project, a luminous collection of 30 real love stories gathered from the community of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California — ordinary people with extraordinary hearts who agreed to sit down, share a glass of wine, and tell the truth about love. And love, in Alison's telling, is far bigger than romance. It's the widow in her 80s who walked up to a man and asked him for one last affair. It's the woman who began writing letters to a man on death row and ended up marrying him. It's the mother who lost a child and somehow found gratitude in the grief. It's platonic love, gay love, trans love, filial love, love for a place — every version of the word that matters. Alison gathered these stories the way a journalist does: with a microphone, a notebook, and a dog named Mookie who made strangers want to stop and talk. But she also gathered them the way a woman healing from something does: with her whole heart open, desperate to remember that connection is still possible, that the world still has more love in it than hate.
At its core, The Love Project is the book Alison wrote for her 93-year-old mother — a woman who modeled resilience by finding love after 20 years of widowhood — and in doing so, wrote it for all of us. For anyone who has felt alone in their pain, disillusioned with the world, or quietly wondering if love — in any of its forms — is still out there for them, this book is a shelter. It is proof that we have more in common than what divides us, and that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is go looking for the stories that remind us of that.
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