The Love Of My Life Analysis

T.C Boyle’s short story, The Love of my Life, mocks the idealization and seemingly invincibility of teenage love. Boyle uses pop culture as an avenue to show the distortedness of upper-class teenagers’ view on the American Dream. China and Jeremy already have education, family, and adequate wealth, so to them all they think they want is each other.
China’s fascination with movies creates a false impression of love. She wants sex like the “way it was in the movies, where the starts ambushed each other on beds the size of small planets.” These movies hardly show the characters using contraceptions, so it is no surprise that once China and Jeremy had space and time for sex, they became too consumed with passion and ignored precautions. China states that “I will never, never be like those breeders that bring their puffed-up squalling little red-faced babies to class.” She holds an extremely negative view about teenage mothers and criticizes their entire existence, never once thinking that she could actually be one of them. One in five teenage girls that have sex, end up pregnant, But yet most girls, like China, think that could never happen to me! That happens to other people.
Boyle foreshadows
Even once they commit the horrendous act, they remain thinking and acting like children. When Jeremy is arrested he claims he “knew his role well enough, because he’d seen it played out a thousand times on the tube,” instead of taking any responsibility he decides to listen to pop culture and “deny everything.” China dramatizes her ordeal by declaring that she doesn’t care “what they did to her, beat her torture her, [or] drag her weeping through the streets in a dirty white dress with ‘Baby Killer’ stitched over her breast in scarlet letters.” They show no remorse for their child, and only worry for themselves. While China anguishes over her relationship with Jeremy, he despairs over his ruined