Whatever...Love Is Love

am I a partner?am I forgiving?am I a bad girl?am I resilient?am I enough?In the summer of 2013, lying in a hospital bed, her body riddled with parasites, Maria Bello realized that waiting to do something isn't always an option. In a moment, everything could end, and all of her stories would be lost- [...]
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am I a partner?am I forgiving?am I a bad girl?am I resilient?am I enough?In the summer of 2013, lying in a hospital bed, her body riddled with parasites, Maria Bello realized that waiting to do something isn't always an option. In a moment, everything could end, and all of her stories would be lost--stories of love, family, miracles, and madness that filled the hundreds of journals she had been keeping since she was a child. She read through each one of those journals during her months of recovery, and in the process began to uncover who she was and who she had become. And instead of coming to any definitive answers, she found herself asking more and more questions. One of the biggest questions she was asking herself at the time was how to tell her son, then 12 years old, that she had fallen in love with a woman. Jack's response--simple and wise beyond his years--was "Whatever, Mom . . . love is love." Realizing that Jack didn't see traditional labels of partnership, Maria began to contemplate the labels she herself had worn during her life.Her essay "Coming Out as a Modern Family" was featured in the New York Times's Modern Love column and started a worldwide conversation about how so many of the labels we all know and still use today are simply outdated. Partnership, career, love, sexuality--all of these aspects of life are fluid now. We no longer fit into tidy little boxes, and neither do our lives. Questioning those labels is at the heart of Whatever . . . Love Is Love.Written as a series of provocative questions and thoughtful answers, this book is filled with deeply personal, often funny, and even passionate stories, stories in which Maria bares her soul and shares what she's learned--not only about romantic love, but also about her relationship with her parents, her feelings about spirituality, her sexual identity, the highs and lows of her career, her humanitarian work, and her worth as a mother. Using her experiences as a gateway to a larger conversation, Maria encourages you to think about the life you lead, who you love, what you do, what you believe in, and what you call yourself . . . and helps you to realize that the only labels that matter are the ones we place on and accept for ourselves, even if they don't fit the mold of "typical."