#star-crossed-world

#star-crossed-world

In its infamous finale, a woman is tricked into eating her children. The multiple limb hackings in Titus Andronicus are part of a smorgasbord of grotesque recrimination that also includes adultery, murder, rape and mutilation.

Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story.

The short answer is yes, unless you take fiction for what it is-fiction. When you long for something you don't have, it can lead to dissatisfaction with what you DO have. Romantic fiction has witty, heartfelt dialogue, buckets of romantic gestures, and protagonists who have a preternatural ability to read each other's minds. It's easy to forget it is not real. This can set up unrealistic expectations both conscious and unconscious.

For my husband's 69th birthday, I asked his older sister to drive me to the neighborhoods where they grew up. I photographed the grocery store, his schools, the churches he attended, the vacant lot where his childhood home once stood. I printed the photos and placed them in an album. My husband, a verbose storyteller, especially about his life growing up as one of nine siblings, was very surprised. Nola Nolen 74, Harmony, Pa.

These three relationships started the old-fashioned way (forget the apps), with romantic stories that could have been lifted straight from a rom-com

Being Jackie, though, she never raises her mellifluous, Atlantic-accented voice, even while reprimanding her son. "Only one of us knows what it's like to marry into this family," she reminds him. "There isn't enough exposure in the world to prepare a woman to be your wife." A marriage to a Kennedy is not a partnership but a trade-off: Any woman who agrees to marry John will have to orbit him, give her life for his.