Content Warning: The source text deals with issues including terminal illness, assisted suicide, and mental health deterioration, including references to depression and anxiety.

The memoir’s central conflict revolves around Brian’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. Before Brian gets sick, Bloom and Brian’s life is idyllic. After meeting in middle age, they develop such a strong connection that they leave their respective marriages for one another. For roughly 15 years thereafter, Bloom and Brian’s love sustains them. However, Brian’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis forces the couple to reevaluate who they are as individuals and in relation to one another.

In Love centers the ways in which the disease changes the couple’s marriage and impacts them emotionally. In Part 2, Chapter 3, Amy Bloom acquaints herself with the progression of her husband’s illness, saying:

That steady loss, that steady unraveling, is sometimes paused but never stopped. The shape of the self is held together as well as can be, with the use of alternative pathways in the brain [...] by the person suffering and with backup from the person helping, until none of it’s enough and the vessel [...] begins to soften and drop its walls (58-59).

This passage acts as a

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