Side by Side: Writing Your Love Story

by Susan M. Tiberghien

What is the secret to lasting love? How do couples create a beautiful marriage of love and respect that will last for a lifetime? These are questions American writer Susan Tiberghien is asked most often at writers' conferences held in the United States and Europe. These questions took her on a journey of personal reflection. Meditating on what led her to fall in love with a Frenchman and what went right in their marriage, she recalled the good moments and began writing them down. Susan and her husband Pierre have been married for more than fifty-five years. They raised six children while living in five different countries. SIDE BY SIDE: WRITING YOUR LOVE STORY is a memoir of Susan's marriage and an invitation to you, the reader, to write your own love story with your partner. SIDE BY SIDE: WRITING YOUR LOVE STORY is organized by seven stages of a relationship: courtship, commitment, outward reflection, inward reflection, growing, wellbeing, and celebrating. Beginning with falling in love and courtship, Susan shows you how to recall those early moments of seduction and being seduced. This dance between partners is key to the next stage of commitment. Marriage is beautiful because it is a commitment couples choose to renew with one another every day. Whether you are engaged to be married, or you've been married for a few days or for more than 20,075 days (fifty-five years), it is natural to experience feelings that lead you to question the commitment you made do each other. Everyone has doubts. The journal practice exercises in this chapter help to explore both the sunny and dark side of doubts, allowing you to focus and to build on what is working in the relationship. As a couple, you face many challenges together, especially with raising children and working outside of the home. SIDE BY SIDE: WRITING YOUR LOVE STORY is filled with life stories every parent understands, especially when each partner was raised in a different country. For instance, what will be the family’s common language? In addition to managing cultural differences, all parents share the same challenges around discipline, rules, and the unique needs of each child. Journal prompts provide a framework for your memories and insights. Described by her readers as a lyrical writer with a compassionate approach to telling and sharing life stories, Susan weaves her journal entries and life stories throughout the book, and adds inspirational quotes from well-known writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Brenda Ueland, William Zinsser, Dorothea Brande, Annie Dillard, and Thomas Merton. When you make writing a habit, you change your life story. SIDE BY SIDE: WRITING YOUR LOVE STORY teaches you how to make writing a habit and how to transform your story as a couple into your marriage memoir, expressing the best of each of you as an individual, and the powerful entity you are as two people who love each other.

228 pages, Paperback

First published April 13, 2015

About the author

After marrying a Frenchman, following him around Europe with a growing family, I started to write more or less full time at the age of 50 when we settled down in Geneva, Switzerland. I published my first book, Looking for Gold: A Year in Jungian Analysis, at the age of 60.

I continued to publish, two more memoirs and numerous narrative essays in journals and anthologies. Then the widely read One Year to a Writing Life, and spring 2015, Side by Side: Writing your Love Story and Footsteps: In Love with a Frenchman.

I have been teaching writing for over 20 years, here in Geneva where I direct the Geneva Writers' Group (an association of writers, with presently over 230 members), around Europe, and in the States for the International Women's Writing Guild, at Writers Centers, and at CG Jung Societies.

I feel extremely fortunate at the age of 80 to still be in love with the same Frenchman, to enjoy visits from our six children and spouses and sixteen grandkids...and to write and teach and read and dream.

Reviews

[Leanne Hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I bought this book as an aid to writing memoir, I think its main charm lies in its own autobiographical detail. The author is eighty years old, American, married to a Frenchman, and living in Switzerland. She raised six children and became a writer after fifty. Her story is both ordinary and unusual, in that her marriage followed a very traditional model and yet her approach to life has always been to look below the surface, seek out the meaning of things, and derive lessons and blessings wherever they can be located along the way.

The book itself is laid out under seven chapter headings which use objects from nature as launching-off points for reflections on courtship, intimacy, growth, conflict, challenges and the like. Each chapter offers poignant examples of journalling, where the author writes about her and her husband’s long and very rich relationship. Also included are quotes from other well-known inspirational writers and suggestions on how to write one’s own journal entry on a given topic. The author envisages that, by the end of the book, the reader will have produced several pages of memoir about his or her own love story.

But as I said, the thing I most enjoyed about this book was the glimpse I got into the life of a wife, mother and writer who has dedicated her life to making a positive contribution in the world. From the descriptions of holidays with the children to reflections on growing old together, its contents inspire and motivate. A gentle read, this is the perfect book for taking on holiday to a mountain retreat or island hideaway, when you want to get perspective on your life and have the time to think and plan.