Tethered by their emptiness, confusion, and lack of experience, John and Marisol become quick friends–and seeing as Marisol is the first person that John was able to connect to, he falls in love with her. Drawn to the rawness and honesty of Escape Velocity, John devises a way to meet Marisol at the record store the day she delivers her publication for distribution. He is particularly drawn to a zine titled Escape Velocity , written by someone named Marisol, who is a self-proclaimed “Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee Cambridge, Massachusetts, rich spoiled lesbian private-school gifted-and-talented writer virgin looking for love” (9). John’s thoughts and feelings are shared with others anonymously through a zine he writes and publishes titled Bananafish , which he writes after being inspired by a series of zines he read at a record store. I’m so protected now, dear mother, sometimes I feel like I’m barely alive. So I took all of the sadness of the divorce, and all the love I’d once had for both of you, and all the fear I had of being alone, and turned it into a stone wall to hide behind. He he poingnantly expresses this notion in a letter to his mother: Because of this, John not only has difficulties expressing his emotions, but he also prevents other people from reaching out to him in order to avoid being hurt. On one hand, his father abandoned John and his mother because they did not comply with his self-image as an elitist literary publisher and playboy on the other hand, because of John’s resemblance to his father, his mother has avoided physical contact with her son for over six years (no hugs, no physical proximity, nada). Front cover of Ellen Wittlinger’s Hard LoveĮllen Wittlinger’s Hard Love is at its core a novel about love, but it is quite different from other young adult novels on the subject that were written in the late 1990s. The narrative is centered on John Galardi (known by some as Gio), a junior in a high school who is still haunted by the ghosts of his parents’ divorce.

Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger