How does the author use movie references to inform her shifting understanding of romantic love?

Throughout Everything I Know About Love, Alderton alludes to movies when she is speaking about her crushes and sexual partners. She utilizes cinema to gauge the intensity and validity of her own relationships. By way of example, when the author is on a train, she imagines the interaction between herself and the boy sitting next to her playing out as a version of the love story in the movie Before Sunrise, in which the characters meet on a train and proceed to spend the night in a foreign city discussing film, music, and sleeping together in a park. As the memoir progresses, the author’s growing ability to to delineate between lived experience and cinema reflects her maturation and ability to view herself outside of the ideals of fictionalized movie romance. When...