One True Loves

An Impossible Situation, Handled Honestly

Before Taylor Jenkins Reid became the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, she was writing emotionally ambitious contemporary romance that asked harder questions than the genre typically permits. One True Loves is the clearest example of this: a novel built around a situation so inherently impossible that any resolution will involve loss, and the author’s determination to let all three of its central figures be comprehensible and worthy of sympathy.

Emma Blair married Jesse at twenty-three, and they spent their early years traveling the world together. Then Jesse was lost in a helicopter accident while on assignment, presumed dead. Emma returned to her Massachusetts hometown, rebuilt her life slowly, fell in love with her childhood friend Sam, and became engaged. And then Jesse was found — alive, on a remote island — and the structure she had constructed on top of her grief suddenly requires complete reassessment.

Two Men, No Villain

The novel’s decisive formal choice is to make both Jesse and Sam fully realized characters with genuine claims on Emma’s love and loyalty. Jesse is not diminished by absence, nor is he turned into an obstacle. Sam is not merely a placeholder whom Emma will obviously leave for her great love. Both relationships are depicted as real, and the choice Emma must ultimately make is real in its consequences.

Reid is interested in the question of whether love can be simultaneously unique and multiple — whether the love we have for different people at different points of our lives can all be authentic without any of them being lesser.

The Emotional Architecture of Grief

Emma’s gradual reconstruction of her life after Jesse’s disappearance is handled with attention to the specific textures of grief: the way it changes over time, the guilt of eventually feeling better, the strange double consciousness of loving someone new while continuing to love someone lost. This emotional honesty elevates what might otherwise be a melodramatic premise into something closer to genuine investigation.

The resolution, when it comes, is not entirely satisfying — partly by design. Reid doesn’t believe the situation can be fully resolved, and she lets that show.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A brave, compassionate romance that poses a genuinely impossible dilemma and has the integrity to resist the easy answers.

The One True Loves Review

Published in 2016, One True Loves takes a premise that could easily have collapsed into soap opera and treats it with genuine emotional seriousness. Emma marries her high-school sweetheart Jesse; a year into their marriage, Jesse disappears in a helicopter accident and is presumed dead. Emma rebuilds her life, slowly and painfully, and eventually becomes engaged to Sam, a steady, kind man who helped her through her grief. Then Jesse, alive, comes home. The novel’s question is not which man Emma should choose in the abstract, but who she has become, and whether the woman she is now belongs with the life she lost or the life she built.

Two Versions of a Self

Reid’s most insightful move is to recognise that the choice between Jesse and Sam is really a choice between two versions of Emma. Jesse represents the ambitious, adventurous young woman she was before the accident — the version of herself oriented entirely around him. Sam represents the calmer, more grounded woman she became in his absence. The novel understands that you cannot return to a former self by returning to the person who shaped it, and that grief, once survived, changes you in ways that cannot be reversed by the removal of its cause.

Grief, Guilt, and Moving Forward

What keeps the book from melodrama is its honesty about the guilt involved. Emma does not get to feel uncomplicatedly happy about Jesse’s return, because his return means betraying Sam, and her grief — which she had finally metabolised — turns out to have been the engine of her growth. Reid refuses to make either man a villain, which means the dilemma is genuinely difficult and the resolution genuinely earned. It is one of Reid’s slighter novels in scope, lacking the sweep of her Hollywood books, but it is sharply observed within its smaller frame and demonstrates the empathy for difficult emotional choices that defines her best work.

A Quieter Reid

For readers who came to Reid through her glamorous, decade-spanning epics, One True Loves offers something more intimate and domestic. There are no movie stars or rock bands here, only an ordinary woman facing an extraordinary version of a very ordinary problem: how to honour a past without being imprisoned by it. The book’s modest scale is part of its appeal, and it rewards readers who value emotional precision over spectacle.

A Husband Returns From the Dead

One True Loves (2016) hands Emma Blair an impossible dilemma: her first husband Jesse, lost in a helicopter crash and presumed dead, reappears years later — just as she has rebuilt her life and become engaged to her steady, kind former classmate Sam. Reid refuses to caricature either man, so the choice is not between a good option and a bad one but between two genuine loves and two versions of Emma herself, the adventurous woman she was with Jesse and the settled woman she has become with Sam. The novel’s quiet argument is that grief changes us so thoroughly that returning to a former life is not actually possible, and that choosing a future sometimes means honestly mourning a past that can no longer be inhabited.

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