Love And Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape Analysis

Love and Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape was written by Amanda Brown in 2002. Although, in this case, the story cannot accurately be described as “written” or even a “story.” The work consists of a number of songs, arranged in a way so that the titles, when read consecutively, tells a story. The main point of the story, presumably, is to illustrate the cyclic nature of love, considering the fact that the mixtape starts and ends with the same song. However, the mixtape is poorly assembled, consisting of songs which have no relevance within the narrative. Specifically, Brown is unable to keep the story concise. The story is filled with repetitive song titles that have the same meaning and contribute the same progression of plot to the story. …show more content…
Despite the fact that, arguably, the mixtape track form contributes no deeper way to tell the story and largely only serves as a cool and inventive way to tell a story. The story that Brown tells begins with a woman who is alone. Through the song titles we learn that she has entered into a relationship, gets married and begins to suspect that her partner is cheating on her. While all this can be inferred from the song titles, the problem with the story is that we cannot truly empathize with the characters or even examine the situation that the two characters find themselves in at anything other than face value. The readers are almost unable to think critically about the story because of how little information is presented by the