CJ Hauser uses her now-beloved title essay as an anchor around which to explore, through excavation of both her own personal and larger familial hope chest of 'love stories, ' the narratives of romantic love we are taught and which we tell ourselves, and the need to often rewrite those narratives to find an accurate version of ourselves in them. Covering ground ranging from her and her relatives' own romantic pasts to the much wider natural, supernatural, and cultural worlds, CJ relates the family legacies and lessons she imbibed in her youth, and the relationships formed in echo of those lessons, which helped to shape her early understanding of love and life.

Emerging from the rigorous honesty and radical empathy of these twenty pieces, CJ relinquishes the idea of a single, permanent love story--in favor of the metaphor of a happy haunted house as a space that contains many stories, many pasts, and multiple histories. These are hopeful pieces, which address the pain and complication of living in the present while being informed by things that have happened in one's past, and the kind of energy and spirit necessary to attempt love, again and again.