Say More About Love—By Saying Less

Daniel Handler's six-word love journey + a six-word marriage proposal + enter our six words on love challenge to win our book, "Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak"

Reader Challenge: Six Words on Love & Heartbreak

Engaged in Jerusalem. Thank you, God. —Lynn Harris

Butterflies still kicking after ten years. —Lisa Taylor

My mother warned me about you. —Angie Brown

Tried men. Tried women. Like cats. —Donna Bomgarner

It's like my heart has sciatica. —Jonathan Ames

Everyone's crazy except you and me. —Mark Frauenfelder

Love often feels bigger than words, so we’ve crafted a particularly challenging task for you: sum it up in only six. You can write about love gone right, gone wrong, gone somewhere in the middle; love in the mushy-gushy roses and chocolate kind of way or in the myriad of other ways we make sense of this thing called love. We’d love to hear about all your loves and heartbreaks. Comment below (or, if you’re reading this on email, go to our Substack page to comment). We’ll send our top pick a copy of our book, Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak, and feature it, along with our honorable mentions, in the next issue of Say Less.

Reader challenges are open to all subscribers during the launch of our new Substack newsletter. Down the road, we’ll have challenges, contests, and bonus content on the craft of storytelling only available to our paid subscribers. Above all, we appreciate your support for what’s been a fifteen year passion project that many people…well…love!

Backstory of the Week: a Six-Word Marriage Proposal

Just before Thanksgiving, The New York Times teamed-up with The Six-Word Memoir Project and asked their readers what they were thankful for this year—a year that has proved hard to find a silver lining. Their readers responded in force with more than 10,000 entries.

One entry was more special than the others: “Will you marry me, Taylor Hollenkamp?” Lauren Few (right) submitted these six words, and on Thanksgiving morning, her girlfriend (left), read it five times before it sank in that she was Taylor Hollenkamp. And, you guessed it, she said yes! The couple plan to be married in June. We sent the happy couple an early wedding present—a copy of our book Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak.

Read more of their story here. 

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Celebrity Six: Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, on Love

When Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak published in 2010, we did what we also do when a new Six-Word book comes out: hit the road and asked our contributors in each city to share their six words and a backstory. Daniel Handler, a contributor to four of our books, wowed a packed crowd at San Francisco’s A Clean-Well Lighted Place for Books when he shared his entire history of love —in order — six words at a time. Check it out in this raw and wonderful two-minute video that I’m guessing was shot on a Flip Video (which I kinda miss).

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Share the love, share the book! Thank you for spreading the word about Say Less from The Six-Word Memoir Project. We love this community.

A last-minute Valentine’s gift? Glad you asked. May we present Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak, a collection of 500 stories selected from the thousands submitted to our “Love & Heartbreak” category on sixwordmemoirs.com. We’ve got memoirists who are gay, straight, single, married, divorced, and polyamorous, hailing from Australia to Vietnam. A story by sex columnist Dan Savage sits alongside one by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hass. Janice Dickinson dishes out six words of advice in the brazen spirit she’s known for, while Chip Rowe—a.k.a. The Playboy Advisor—reveals something we suspect he’s never told his millions of readers. And what has the world’s most famous divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, learned about love? Heartbreaking, indeed.

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