“We Live in Time” is a masterclass in writing love and loss
Left to right: “We Live in Time,” starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, explores themes of love, death and grief
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Screenshots from TikTok If you spend any time on BookTok or Bookstagram or book-adjacent Reddit (Bookit? Booddit? Boot?), you’ve probably come across the “book husband.” Since encountering the phrase, I haven’t been able to shake it. I’ve been muttering things around my apartment like “I am, as always, your humble book husband” and “What did you say about my book husband?!” Other than one of those sticky internet phrases that gets stuck in your brain, what is a book husband? What are their lives like? Should I… become one? Online, a book husband is one of two types: a hot fictional character, or someone married to a book influencer. The former is just good old horny-reading. Having a book husband or boyfriend is an online way of saying you’re fantasizing about a fictional babe—I haven’t bumped into anyone with a “book fiancé” or “book ex” yet, but I’m sure they’re out there. Having a crush because you’re immersed and having emotional responses to an invented world is, to a certain extent, the entire point of fiction. And reorienting your personality around an imagined relationship has surely been around since someone said “Is there a Mrs. Guy-Painted-On-The-Wall-Of-The-Cave?” in the Lascaux caverns. But the stranger usage of “book husband” is to describe an influencer by transitive property: someone who is married to a book influencer or enthusiast. The phenomenon strikes me as another flavor of “wife guy,” a subset of internet main character who gets their e-fame from posting about their spouse. Wife guys have enough clout and notoriety to warrant a Wikipedia entry and an article about how there are too many articles about wife guys. Book husband content piggybacks off of a wife’s book posting, and you get a lot of stuff cataloging the burdens of dating a reader, like this “booktok husbands be like” video with jokes about how the husband carries all the books or doesn’t get attention when the wife’s reading. Or this “I’m a book girl’s husband” video about listening to your wife talk about books or gaming while she reads. “What about me,” the […]
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Left to right: “We Live in Time,” starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, explores themes of love, death and grief
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