Review by Amanda Marie Gipson
Susan Ostrov’s Loveland: A Memoir of Love and Fiction asserts that synthesis is foundational to analysis. In Loveland, Ostrov’s lived experience and academic scholarship — she holds a PhD in English Literature and specializes in romantic love — converge to challenge traditional boundaries between the academic and the anecdotal. Refreshingly, Ostrov’s memoir ignores the predictable chicken-or-the-egg debate to ask enduring questions: what do we know, how do we know it, and what does it mean?
For Ostrov, understanding begins with synthesis—just as objective knowledge grows out of subjective experience. Her critique of Victorian literature examines how these texts fail to address the realities of life beyond the altar. Her husband, like a “Victorian husband” (126), refused her access to shared accounts. Ostrov recounts, “I felt helpless to change this; he was immovable, and what could I do, divorce him?” (127). Here, analysis draws from subjective reflection, while synthesis—often tied to objectivity—emerges through personal experience.
Knowing, Ostrov demonstrates, is not a detached process. For example, she reflects on how the literary ideals of romance she internalized as a young woman clashed with the realities of her marriage. She writes that she “had no idea what marriage would be like…because…my model for a love relationship was chiefly romantic novels whose last pages were a promise…of ‘emotional satisfaction’…if not eternal bliss” (99-100). By weaving personal reflection into scholarly critique, she articulates consequences of romantic idealism and challenges the notion that subjectivity weakens intellectual inquiry.
Even as she cautions against idealizing romance, Ostrov’s account of her affair feels imbued with some of the very ideals she seeks to deconstruct. She describes it as her chance to “…take a swing at the ball, knowing [she] could strike out and never have another chance at bat” (171). Readers who hold opposing views on infidelity, like me, might find emotional space in Ostrov’s presentation of her affair. Even within a self-actualizing and potentially liberative framework, her choices are not offered with justification but as a site of intellectual inquiry. Her willingness to embrace contradiction and ambiguity demonstrates insight and subverts expectations. For writers developing their craft, Ostrov’s method offers a valuable model of complexity and narrative depth.
At times, however, Loveland undermines its own impact. Ostrov uses italics to emphasize key reflections throughout the text. Such sections required concerted focus on the act of reading rather than the experience of it. This has rhetorical implications beyond pulling the reader out of the narrative. While the italics echo her desire to challenge boundaries between the academic and the personal, the technique arguably works against the book’s central premise of synthesis and analysis as intertwined processes.
A powerful feminist undercurrent guides Loveland’s most compelling insights. Echoing hooks and Haraway, Ostrov validates subjectivity as a core element of intellectual inquiry. This emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between the personal and the intellectual stands out as a defining feature of the text. Though she stops short of developing this into a feminist polemic, her nuance and restraint reveals Loveland as a love letter to the passion that drives scholarship.
Even potential challenges to engagement in Ostrov’s narrative invite readers to actively approach synthesis and analysis as deeply interdependent—each enriching the other by creating meaning through distinct, yet complementary, perspectives. For writers, Loveland serves as a reminder that powerful stories emerge from engaging fully with both what we know and how we’ve lived it.
Amanda Marie Gipson is a creative writer from Northern Appalachia with a background in community-based agricultural education. She earned her MFA from Wilkes University in 2023 and also holds an M.Agr from Colorado State University.
Amanda now facilitates storytelling workshops in rural and agricultural communities to promote resilience, wellbeing, and community engagement. When not working on a memoir-in-letters to her beloved Labrador, Amanda also serves as the fiction editor for Northern Appalachian Review. Her writing has recently appeared in Artium: A Journal of Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry, and The Disruptive Quarterly.
