Chris is a middle-aged, married woman when she meets Dick and falls in love. What follows are a series of letters declaring her love for him, but will they ever come to a conclusion?
Review
We read ‘I Love Dick’ as our bookclub book last month and honestly it didn’t go down well, few of us finished, because we didn’t want to, one didn’t even try to read it- she just knew it wasn’t her type of book. I did manage to finish, but not in time for bookclub, I carried on reading afterwards because I was so close to the end, but it took me a long time to read those last 40-50 pages.
Having said that we didn’t enjoy it, it did make for some good discussion- not least that we were trying to disentangle the author Chris from the character Chris, there is definitely an autobiographical element there, and other characters referred to were real people known to Chris (including Chris’ huband; both real and literary).
Overall it was sort of creepy. Basically Chris has this obsession on a person who she has met twice, it’s pretty stalkeresque. She at one point is talking about books of his she has read to his in her letters, almost like she thinks she is having a conversation with him. Another member of the group said the books she talks about are actually books that the writer Chris has written, so maybe this is meant to be some sort of comment on obsessive love being all in the mind.
Apparently the book has been praised as being feminist. I found this hard to see. Chris spoke of other feminists which I suppose could be seen as being feminist in itself- but actually it’s parrotting, I wouldn’t call it any more feminist than one of my book reviews of feminist books. And Chris (the character) was very dependant on men which doesn’t seem feminist at all.
If you’re looking for a book to discuss this may well actually be a good choice, but I wouldn’t recommend if you want to read it just because.
2/5
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Paperback (£8.46)
Kindle (£4.69)
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