Hard Love Themes

When Marisol tells the entire world that she's a "Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee Cambridge, Massachusetts, rich spoiled lesbian private-school gifted-and-talented writer virgin looking for love" (1.52),...

Taylor Swift might be your go-to for catchy love songs about broken hearts and romantic gestures, but Hard Love tells us a lot about love. You probably could have guessed that from the title, thoug...

When your main character is a writer, it's no surprise that the novel is full of observations about the process of writing itself. Hard Love looks at zines specifically, but really, we can apply wh...

John's pants might as well be on fire in Hard Love—that's how much he lies. He tells his parents different things about each other, and he never manages to get the truth about how he's feeling ou...

Abandoned by his father when he was ten years old, John is guarded: He doesn't let anyone in, and he doesn't allow himself to get emotional ever. Enter Marisol. She's just as guarded as he is, but...

The friendships in Hard Love sure are complicated, but they're also very realistic. In the novel, just like in real life, friends fight, make up, have misunderstandings, support one another, and ac...

If you're expecting a secret room full of horrors or a cabin in the woods, then you've come to the wrong place—the fear in Hard Love just ain't the horror film type. Instead, John is scared of em...

No one exactly goes into the final frontier here, but there's plenty of exploring to be done in Hard Love. John and Marisol are exploring who they want to become by testing out different versions o...