Commentary on "Love of My Life" by TC Boyle

TC Boyle’s story, “Love of My Life,” was disturbing and scary. I respected and was impressed by how skillful and artfully Boyle turned the true story into a fictional piece. The thing I was most influenced by to use in my own writing was his changeable voice. He definitely had a voice that was consistent throughout the majority of the piece, but sometimes, when he was describing something or someone, his voice and style would slightly change to subconsciously encourage that change. An example is in his explanation of young China when she was on the phone with her mother, “She was in her socks, socks so thick they were like slippers… the polished floors as slick as the sidewalk outside, and she like the feel of that, skating indoors in her big socks.” Very subtly, in the way Boyle repeats the word “socks” and his inserting of “and she likes the feel of that” gives the passage an innocent and immature voice that helps in the description of the character.

The story itself carried most of the darkness, but Boyle encouraged it with the way that he structured it. The beginning of the story was good by setting up the characters in a scene that made it impossible not to think that something horrible was going to happen. It also was made dark in the way that watching something innocent be destroyed feels more wrong than watching something ugly and old and forgotten be destroyed. Boyle set up the characters to be loved and seen as innocent and lovely, so their demise was all the more heartbreaking and horrible, all the way to the awful moment of the little baby girl being dropped in the dumpster.

Although it was a hard thing to do to tackle a true story in fiction form, as a story alone, it wasn’t wholly believable that either of the characters would have acted the way they did. The fact that it was a true story wasn’t enough to carry the weight of the contradicting characters; more backstory and explanation was needed.