Legs Hearts Minds - Chris Jones

 Sub-title: Loss and Its Remedies

I heard about this book from an article previewing its 1st chapter in the Atlantic magazine.  It took a few weeks to get it from the library and I finished reading it in one day.  The author's memoir starts with him finding out his wife is texting with one of his neighbors, her lover, as he watches their exchange on her laptop that he'd borrowed to do some work.  He's a journalist, so he distances from the shock by taking screenshots and confronting her shortly after, declaring their marriage over. He'd recently lost his job and now he loses his wife, his house, half his assets and has to share his children. He's in his mid-forties and no longer can imagine a future. He turns to a life long love, football (actually soccer) and finds a way to go on.

It was a painful, heartfelt, emotional read.  His self-examination unfolds; his grief, loss and reactions are raw and real.  His pain resonated with times in my own life.  A brave deep dive into surviving loss and going on living.

Quotes:

 "When someone falls out of love with you you receive less love.  That's the simplest math of the breakup equation.  But the love you felt before--the amount of love you're ready to give--stays relatively the same.  It's not like it vanishes.  It's part of who you are, a biological measure as quantifiable as your white blood cell count or your bilirubin levels.  I was more than lonely, or the standard kind of lonely.  I had to much love, and I needed somewhere for my love to go."

"I wanted to tell the teenager at the soccer shop that he didn't look brave for not taking cover [during a fierce storm]; he looked uninitiated.  I wanted to tell him that experience sometimes makes you less confident, not more, and sometimes fear isn't a thing you can conquer but a thing you acquire."

"I had taught him, however accidentally, that it's okay to root for strangers, to be lifted or leveled by circumstances beyond your control."

"There is a third option when you choose to love something or someone.  They love you back, deeply and fiercely, but not forever.  One moment they are here beside you and the next they disappear, and not always because they want to go....Monuments are built to love.  That doesn't make love permanent.  That makes love worth remembering."

"We don't remember facts. We remember how facts made us feel."

Published: 2025  Read: July 2026 Genre: Memoir