Structure

Everything I Know About Love is divided into 45 chapters that vacillate between narrative passages, email, lists, and recipes. The author intersperses excerpts from “The Bad Date Diaries”, "The Bad Date Diaries: Twelve Minutes,” “The Bad Date Diaries: A Hotel on a Main Road in Ealing,” and “The Bad Date Diaries: a €300 Restaurant Bill,” throughout the text, instead of placing them within one section, in order to mirror the longevity of her bad dating experiences in the text’s form. The presence of these anecdotes throughout the memoir, in her teenage years, early twenties, and late twenties, highlights the fact that she has struggled to find supportive and validating romantic love throughout her life. If the Bad Date Diaries chapters had been presented as one condensed section, the narrative form would have suggested that the author experienced a phase of dating questionable men that she matured out of...