EVEN IF IT HURTS by MARNI MANN

‘The surprise is you.’
“Will it always feel this way?”

Even If It Hurts is one of those books that we have an intense love/hate relationship with. The story both made us incredibly angry yet full of love. Frustrating, beautiful, unjust and filled with love. Marni Mann is such a wonderful storyteller who cares so deeply for her characters, ensuring we fall in love with them thus feeling the incredible pain and the intense love they have for each other. It’s a testament to her quality of writing that we both loved and hated this story. That it made us cry real tears.

‘As I swallowed his air, feeling the heat come off his body, I could almost taste his skin.’

When you become overwhelmingly emotional no matter which end of the spectrum you find yourself, a writer has nailed it. And Marni Mann did. When you are unable to stop thinking of the story, trying to rationalise the actions of the characters whilst swinging on a pendulum from anger to understanding; from love to hate, you know she nailed it. We may not like it, but we lived it till the point of complete immersion.

‘How will I ever say good-bye to you?’
“I should have known…kissing you once would never be enough.”

To be absolutely honest, we don’t even know how we feel right now. We have too many emotions in our hearts which both confuse us, and counteract each other. We do know we cannot stop thinking about it though. First love. Such a powerful memory that never leaves us. What would we do if we met our first love later in life? The person who loved us with the same intensity as we loved them. It doesn’t matter how many years pass, you never forget and you always wonder. What would you do?

‘…as I watched his face, it was like seeing a ghost. Someone my heart had said good-bye to six years ago. Someone I never intended on seeing again.’
‘I hated myself for that. I didn’t know how to make this feeling go away. How to make…it stop. How to make any of this stop.’

Infidelity. Being in love with two people unable to fight it. It’s a tough subject. There is an unwritten rule and assumption that -you cannot and should not- love two people in the same way at the same time. Emotional infidelity, physical infidelity; which is worse or are they both as bad as each other? At what point is a line crossed? Our hearts hurt, our anger raged, our feelings of injustice were rife. But we could not put this book down. Marni Mann made us care, she made us fall in love and she broke our hearts, as we fell in love with two men; Oliver and Lance. Just as Chloe did. We could not choose, we could not fathom how you could hurt either of them. We raged at Chloe for some of her actions, hated her even. But, we were with her, by her side. What would we have done differently? At what stage would we have walked away from love? Even If It Hurts is about making choices, about following your heart and placing a limit on hurt.

‘To make this all feel normal again. To return to before. But before was gone. Everything I had known…was gone…I didn’t recognise her. I didn’t recognise me. I…What the fuck did I just do?’

 ‘It was love. And in that moment, I knew without a doubt in my mind that I couldn’t hurt this man.’