In Heart the Lover, Lily King does the unimaginable: she crafts the perfect coming-of-age college love story, and then unravels and complicates it with a temporal jump into the future, a reunion sobered by time and cancer. Always a genius when it comes to capturing physical experiences on the page, King conjures cancer’s daily horrors in not one but two of her characters. Like the swarms of bees in the chest as a motif of grief in her 2020 novel, Writers and Lovers, King’s characters in Heart the Lover have masses between their ribs and breathlessness that intervenes on both literal and figurative levels. Her descriptions of the hospital are both feeling and clinical, encompassing the beautiful togetherness of family and friends gathering in a moment outside of space and time to be with a dying loved one, as well as the cold, corporate realities of the US medical system.
The true mastery of King’s work is how she incorporates cancer while avoiding the common pitfalls Susan Sontag described in Illness as Metaphor. She resists using the cancer as a metaphor, a mere plot point, or a vehicle for a lesson another character needs to learn. In Heart the Lover, cancer’s presence in the third section seems to serve mainly as a portal between the main character, Casey’s, past and present. These two storylines build bridges through Casey’s life without feeling trite or contrived. Instead, King brings depth and emotion to the underrepresented reality of premature death due to illness.
Additionally, King makes space for the unique experience of caregiving by situating Casey as a well-practiced caregiver in one character’s cancer story and a short-term caregiver in another character’s terminal cancer, revealing both the joys and trials of caregiving. King complicates matters with a secret. Casey must hurt someone near death in order to tell the truth about a secret she has kept for many years. King captures the subtle balance between cancer as collective illness, impacting families and communities as well as cancer’s immeasurable individual toll, especially through premature death. King writes all this with a surety and humor that leads a reader to trust her authorial voice implicitly. She acts out her messages in scenes that revolve around the fraught interconnectedness between love and hope and loss.
I read much of this book in public: at school, a brewery, a restaurant, a café. For the first two sections, I was self-conscious of how often I caught myself smiling at the page. Right around the beginning of the third section, however, when cancer makes its dramatic entrance through a young boy’s body wreaked with the spasms of a tumor-induced seizure, my tears began to flow. I could hardly stop them, unable to quell the memories of a college friend I lost to cancer and a child’s seizure I once witnessed. King’s writing does not merely raise these spirits for no reason. She helps a careful and open reader find comfort in the shared experience of grief. What more could we ask of a novel?
Works Cited
Hudson, Amanda. Cover image. Heart the Lover, by Lily King, Grove Press, 2025.
King, Lily. Heart the Lover. Grove Press, 2025.
King, Lily. Writers and Lovers. Grove Press, 2020.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador, 2001.