44 pages • 1 hour read
Lucy GilmoreThe Lonely Hearts Book Club
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Lucy Gilmore
Gilmore has established herself in the literary world via her literary fiction, contemporary romance, and cozy mystery novels. The Lonely Hearts Book Club is preceded by Gilmore’s novels Ruff and Tumble (2021), I Hate You More (2021), and the Forever Home series (2019-2020). Like The Lonely Hearts Book Club, Gilmore’s previous publications explore themes of love, friendship, and community. Gilmore’s stories prioritize human connection as a source of empowerment and healing, which is an essential facet of the Up Lit genre within which Gilmore writes. Up Lit, a term for uplifting literature, refers to stories with themes of hope, optimism, and strength in the face of adversity. The tone of this novel and the characters’ journeys align with these ideas of overcoming the difficulties of life and finding joy in human relationships.
In Gilmore’s author biography, she defines herself “as a book lover” (357). Her innate appreciation for literature is reflected in the narrative circumstances and themes of The Lonely Hearts Book Club. Throughout the novel, an unlikely cast of characters finds themselves connecting over literary discussions and fictional characters. Like Gilmore herself, her characters find “pleasure in reading” and losing themselves “in a story” (6). Gilmore therefore crafts a rich metanarrative experience in which her audiences find comfort reading about characters who extract similar comfort from books. This follows typical Up Lit trends of enjoying simple pleasures and pursuing genuine, positive relationships.
Gilmore’s subsequent 2024 novel The Library of Borrowed Hearts tackles similar interpersonal and literary dynamics. Much like The Lonely Hearts Book Club, The Library of Borrowed Hearts is a “charming, hilarious, and moving novel about the way books bring lonely souls together” (“The Library of Broken Hearts.” Tamara Berry/Lucy Gilmore). This prompt sequel to The Lonely Hearts Book Club expounds upon The Healing and Transformative Power of Literature and The Importance of Community Support. Gilmore’s personal literary education has granted her expert insight into these complex themes.
Literary Context: Books About Books and Reading
The Lonely Hearts Book Club follows the recent contemporary trend of novels exploring the power of books and reading. The themes, conflicts, and characters in Gilmore’s novel are in conversation with those in parallel novels, including Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021), Erica Bauermeister’s No Two Persons (2023), Sara Nisha Adams’s The Reading List (2021), and Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library (2023). As in Gilmore’s book, these recent novels consider the ways in which books might connect unlikely individuals to one another, offer healing and insight into the individual’s past, and shepherd the individual through trying human emotions and losses.
Book critic Jonathan Russell Clark writes about this current publishing trend in his Literary Hub essay “The Best Books About Books.” Clark remarks that humans are “made up of the books we’ve read. They join us like a curious stranger but stay like an old friend” (Clark, Jonathan Russell. “The Best Books About Books.” Literary Hub, 2015). Gilmore examines these exact facets of bibliophagy throughout The Lonely Hearts Book Club. For characters including Sloane Parker and Arthur McLachlan, books have always offered a retreat from reality and a comforting social network, if fictional. At the same time, books grant these hermetic characters the chance to relate to others via story. Books are both friends to the characters and help them to make friends. In the post-COVID-19 era, bibliophagy novels like Gilmore’s consider new forms of connection and intimacy. Isolation is a staple of contemporary life in Gilmore’s and her contemporaries’ narrative worlds; however, books offer relief from this alienation.
