October 26, 2022
Not Love:
The Road Back Home
Amira Sabree
Angel Dog Productions (2022)
ISBN: 979-8-218-02044-6
New Book Takes Hard Look at Love and Relationships
Amira Sabree’s new book Not Love: The Road Back Home is a poignant collection of essays and poems about the search for love, looking for love in the wrong places, and the power of self-love.
Amira writes about her personal life, changing lovers’ names, but revealing details of relationships with men who for various reasons were unable to be the men she needed them to be. She sheds insight also into her own role in these relationships. The book opens with an essay titled “Not Enough” in which she shares an early childhood memory of being made to feel like she was not good enough. Unbeknownst to her, that feeling would prove to be a roadblock in several adult relationships.
Amira does not write to slam the men in her life. She does not write to express that she feels less than deserving of love. She writes to share how she learned what love was not in her quest to find love. In the book’s introduction she asserts:
“I wrote this book to save myself.... I wanted to understand my relationship with love. I wanted to understand how, where, and when I created my definition. I wanted to understand how life experiences shaped the ways in which I perceived, received, and gave love.... Writing allowed me to slowly realize that our understanding of love starts at such a young age, and if you aren’t careful, and aware, and vigilant, small and big moments can chip away at its foundation.”
Amira explores a variety of these very intimate moments throughout the book, including when she discovers a boyfriend is cheating, and coming to the eye-opening realization she might not find love with a significant other before she is past childbearing years.
Throughout the book there are many touching and explorative passages. There are also some wonderful timeless quotes. Perhaps my favorite of these was this quote from Rumi: “You suppose you are the trouble, but you are the cure. You suppose that you are the lock on the door, but you are the key that opens it.”
Personal poems about experiences between narratives also reflect life epiphanies. As Amira learns from men that they do not have what is needed to provide love, she also begins to realize what she has, and this, is perhaps the biggest takeaway for the reader. The love Amira was so desperately seeking was right there inside her all along, she so eloquently expresses this in the final poem “Found”:
At first, I found you in pieces,
Scattered along the way,
Sometimes in surprising locations
Slowly, I put you back together
With time, with silence, with tears, and with smiles.
In the end, Amira can emphatically proclaim, “And now, I know so clearly what love is…I will never let it go.”
Anyone who has sought love and not found it, or who has known how hard the journey was before they found it, will relate to this book and more than that, find answers for how to go on, to continue the quest without yielding to anything less than real, lasting love.
For more information about Not Love and Amira Sabree, visit www.AmiraSabree.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
