NEVER HAVE I EVER

One woman's confessions about not having a love life.

Beginning with her first boy infatuation at age 7 and advancing to the ripe age of 25, Heaney takes readers on an exhaustive, descriptive jaunt through her multiple boy crushes and attempts to obtain a boyfriend. Readers who get through the first 20 pages without thinking “who cares” may enjoy the author’s self-deprecating humor, which borders on unfunny as she laments and bemoans her fate. She claims, however, that "[m]ost of the time it does not upset me to think about my sad, old, decrepit spinster body…not having a boyfriend at any given moment bothers me very little. Not having ever had one bothers me only slightly more." Tongue in cheek, Heaney reminisces about boys from kindergarten and beyond—their hair, the way they talked, how she felt around them, what she wrote in her diary back then; she quotes to emphasize her points. This sets the tone as she proceeds to delve deeply into her affections, near loves and possible first dates in high school, college and graduate school. She tried drinking, being flirty, being distant and aloof, and even succumbed to the oftentimes humiliating moments of setting up an online dating profile only to discover that some men send the exact same message to every single woman. Throughout multiple near hits, an occasional kiss or two, and numerous boy friends but no boyfriends, the author has maintained her circle of girlfriends to gossip with, run to for advice and downright hate when any of them lands the guy they both secretly desired. Heaney's misadventures are more a testament to the power of friendship among women than anything comical regarding her struggle to find real love.

A drawn-out, sometimes-amusing examination of the author's search for a loving relationship with a man, any man.