Irish author and journalist Sally Hayden became a foreign correspondent to make people care about what was happening in the world, and over the following decade, the world gave her plenty of opportunity to fulfill her mission. In media outlets like the New York Times, the Irish Times, CNN International and the BBC, Hayden covered the wars in Lebanon and Ukraine, the repercussions of the Rwandan genocide and the Fukushima tsunami. She reported on political repression in Syria and Ghana, corruption in Lebanon, Iraqi life under ISIS and civil wars in Nigeria and Uganda.
But Hayden began to develop a protective callus in response to the suffering she witnessed. She wondered whether she had done the same to her Western readers. Did focusing on the countless stories of horror numb them instead of quickening their empathy? What if she instead focused on the love that sustained her subjects? This Is Also a Love Story: Searching for Goodness in a Cruel World is Hayden’s beautiful and harrowing attempt to soften the calluses on her readers’ souls.
Hayden does not spare any of the details of what her subjects have endured, and she clearly lays out Western governments’ complicity in their suffering. But, like a Rembrandt painting, the darkness serves to draw our attention to the light. Or, as Maxim, a Ukrainian LGBTQ+ activist-turned-soldier, puts it, “War is the thing that props up the terrible and beautiful things and shows the people who they really are.”
Young men, like Charles, Ouma and Robert, kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army and forced to commit atrocities as boy soldiers, are joyfully reunited with their families in an act of radical reconciliation replicated across Uganda. Iraqi and Ukrainian couples fall in love and marry in defiance of war. Determined Nigerian mothers like Zainabeu Hamayaj endure unbelievable pain and fear to protect their beloved daughters from Boko Haram, while Syrian daughters still search ceaselessly for their fathers lost in Bashar al-Assad’s death camps.
There is a through line of fierce and unrelenting love in these stories, revealing each individual’s humanity and worth. Reading This Is Also a Love Story will both break your heart and expand it.