Read Christine Pride's ‘All the Men I've Loved Again’ Excerpt

Love triangles have never gone out of style, but it seems like they're absolutely everywhere nowadays. Celine Song has us constantly freaking out over them thanks to Past Lives and her latest, Materialists. Then there's obviously the Challengers phenomenon last year. Oh, and who can forget one of the bigggest book debates of all time: Team Edward and Team Jacob?! But now Christine Pride coming in and changing things up by asking the question: can time really teach us what we really want?

Cosmopolitan has an exclusive look at Christine Pride's All the Men I've Loved Again, set to be released on July 8, 2025. In her solo debut, we follow Cora who is getting a sense of deja-vu when the two men that she couldn't decide between back in her 20s are suddenly back and very interested 20 years later. Now in her forties, will time and second chances help her figure out what she's looking for in love? Here's some more info from our friends at Atria:

From Christine Pride, the beloved coauthor of the Good Morning America Book Club Pick We Are Not Like Them, comes a dazzling solo debut novel about a woman who finds herself in the impossible situation of being in love with the same two men who won her heart in her early twenties again as she nears forty.

It’s 1999, TLC’s “No Scrubs” is topping the charts, y2k is looming on everyone’s mind, and Cora Belle has arrived at college ready to change her life. She’s determined to grow out of the shy, sheltered girl who attended an all-white prep in her all-white suburb. Cora is ready to conquer her fears and find her people, her place in the world, and herself.

What she’s totally unprepared for is Lincoln, with his dark skin, charming southern drawl, and that smile. Because how can you ever prepare yourself for the rollercoaster of first love with all its glorious, bewildering contradictions? Just when Cora thinks she’s got things figured out, a series of surprises and secrets threaten to upend everything she thought she understood about love and loyalty.

In the wake of these developments and a shocking tragedy, a new man enters Cora’s life—Aaron—further complicating everything. He’s the only one who seems to get her, and the letters she writes to him when the two are separated reveal the truth of their inescapable connection. There’s only one problem—how can she fall in love with one man when her heart belongs to another?

Twenty years later, and Cora is all grown up, or mostly, and has cloaked herself in loneliness like a warm blanket. It’s the safest choice. But then an unexpected reconnection and a chance encounter puts her right back where she started. The same two men, the same agonizing decision.

Finding herself in this position—again—will test everything Cora thought she knew about fate, love, and most importantly, herself. All The Men I’ve Loved Again is a big-hearted coming-of-age story for anyone who’s thought what if about a past love and what it would be like to have a second chance.

Ready to jump into Cora's wild love story? Read an exclusive excerpt below! Just don't forget to pre-order All the Men I've Loved Again and check out Christine's previous releases as well!

An Excerpt From All the Men I've Loved Again
By Christine Pride

prologue | CORA HAS TO MAKE A CHOICE

December 2021

Cora’s father always told her the most important decision she’d ever make was who she let herself love. “You’ll have jobs, houses, friends,

but it’s who you give your heart to that’s going to make all the difference. Make that choice carefully, baby girl.”

God, how she’s trying.

Lincoln. Aaron. Lincoln. Aaron. Lincoln. Aaron.

“Have you decided?”

The manicurist’s voice snaps Cora out of her agonizing, even if at first she thinks this stranger is demanding an answer about her love life.

“She’ll have this one.” Neisha thrusts a bottle of neon-blue nail polish at the woman.

The color, Gotta Do Blue, is way outside Cora’s comfort zone of vari- ous shades of neutral, mauve if she’s feeling wild, but she’s happy—grateful even—to defer to her best friend on this decision and most things. Cora can count the times she’s said no to Neisha throughout the entirety of their twenty-year friendship on two hands.

So she nods, and they follow the manicurist to two plush pink chairs that face a boardwalk of sorts. Only in Los Angeles can you get your nails done in front of a bank of open floor-to-ceiling windows facing the sun-dappled expanse of the ocean and let the breeze dry your polish. Every time she visits Neisha, who moved across the country to this land of hikes and eternal sunshine and boba tea ten years ago, Cora wonders if the wildly erratic East Coast seasons she tells herself she loves are overrated. It’s three days before Christmas and seventy degrees; it feels so good and so wrong.

When they’re settled into their chairs, and the opportunity presents itself, Cora finally spills. She tells Neisha everything. It takes six minutes, half of what it would have taken if she’d talked in a normal cadence and not a breathless rush. There was another full minute of silence while Nei- sha held her hand up in the air. “Not another word, I need to process.”

Then.

“Okay, well, I gotta say, this is a curveball I did not see coming.” Neisha sucks her teeth and then adds a shake of the head to make sure there’s no question about the level of her disbelief. They both know she’s referring to the fact that Cora Rose Belle is about the last person you’d expect to find in a reality-show-worthy love triangle. And twice.

“It’s the déjà vu that gets me. How did you up and do this again?” Cora doesn’t bother trying to summon an answer she doesn’t have be-

cause Neisha plows right on along, happy not to have her usual animated monologues interrupted.

“Why does everything need to keep coming back around? Chokers. These biker shorts I probably have no business being in. What’s next? Shai reuniting for a comeback album? Actually, I wouldn’t be mad at that. Re- member how fine that Garfield was? Too fine for that silly-ass name. Is he even alive still? Sad I have to keep googling to see if folks are dead or not. RIP, DMX. We old . . . anyhoo, back to you. I mean, who knew our little Cora could be so damn messy?”

Over the top as ever, Neisha suddenly grabs a thick nail file and pre- tends it’s a microphone. “And now, on tonight’s final episode of The Love Triangle, we’ll find out . . . which man will win Cora Belle’s heart?” She imitates a knockoff Chris Harrison (calling to mind their many Bachelor marathons over the years) and waits for Cora to laugh. Neisha is the kind of friend who routinely forces Cora to act out pivotal scenes from The Color Purple, but right now it’s too much.

The stakes are too high. Who will Cora choose? It’s a question days, months, years, decades in the making; all the history and memories and regret and second guesses have accumulated like the infinite particles of nail dust coating the salon, everywhere you look and just as impossible to wipe clean.

Cora turns to look at Neisha, whose eyes are boring into hers. The soft wrinkles sprouting around those eyes and the fullness that’s crept into her friend’s face often catch Cora off guard, same as the marks the years have made on her own face sometimes do, which makes for the occasional jarring moment when she catches her reflection and thinks, Wait, is that really me? But all Cora has to do is squint sideways at Neisha to see the reed-thin girl who bounded into their freshman bio study group with a purple Afro and a family-size pack of Chips Ahoy cookies tucked under her arm. She’d plopped down next to Cora, neither of them aware that two decades later, they’d still be sitting side by side, having witnessed every part of the other’s journey to this point—a whole lifetime.

“Do I need to dig out a quarter? ’Cause you might as well flip a coin. But you need to do something. Like yesterday. You can’t keep stringing that man along—he’s about to ask you to marry him, Cora!”

Leave it to Neisha to make everything seem easier than it actually is. Or maybe it’s that Cora makes everything harder than it needs to be— that’s entirely possible.

Cora thinks of the email sitting in her drafts folder, the one she wrote and rewrote, then deleted and started again from scratch. Her heart be- gins to pound so hard, she suspects the woman applying polish with such care can feel the pulsing in her fingertips. The pounding escalates when Cora thinks of the gold floor-length dress she’s already bought—well, borrowed from Rent the Runway—to wear Thursday night.

She’ll show up in it or she won’t. She’ll send the email or she won’t. But time is running out either way.

Finally, Neisha abandons her attempts to be glib or stern and shifts her whole body toward Cora. “Okay, sis, real talk. What’s it going to take for you to decide once and for all?”

That’s the problem—she doesn’t know. All Cora has at her disposal is her so-called maturity. She is, after all, staring down forty, a grown-ass lady who should be able to follow her gut, make up her mind about nail polish colors, and decide who she should spend the rest of her life with. But trusting herself has never been one of Cora’s strong suits, even after the self-help books and therapy, all the auditing, healing, self-care, and that one hot-yoga class that almost killed her, which did, at least, make it something of a spiritual experience.

She gazes at the Pacific laid out before her like a glittery blue blanket. Watching the waves slows her heart and her breathing as if they’re trying to match the rhythm of the ocean. Maybe it’s the exact way the light glints against the water that pierces her with a sudden clarity. Or maybe it’s the way Neisha put it: It’s not who she will choose, but how. It starts to dawn on Cora that she’s been going at it all wrong. To know where you’re going, you have to understand where you’ve been. It was another well-worn piece of advice from her father—ever the history teacher.

“You know, I have all the letters Aaron wrote me back then.” “Damn, I really hate that the early aughts was ‘back then,’ and I hate

that word too, aughts. Who came up with that? But, yeah, no surprise you kept the letters.”

“No, I mean I have them with me. Here.” Cora looks down at the canvas tote at her feet, bulging with the past.

“You packed a pile of letters?”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to read them again. I just haven’t been able to go there.”

“I hear that. Do you think Aaron kept the ones you wrote him too? Probably stored in some old Birkenstocks shoebox?” Neisha has cracked herself up and is unfazed by Cora’s glare.

“What! I mean, a Black dude wearing Birkenstocks? Come on. Guess he pulled it off, though, because here we are.”

“Oh God, Neisha, I hate to think of rereading my letters. I can’t even imagine how young and naive I sounded.”

“I sure can! I was there! Remember, I was the one who convinced you that you wouldn’t die of toxic shock syndrome if you dared use a tampon?” The manicurist has to wait for Neisha to stop laughing or risk slathering polish all over her cuticles. “But, hey, I’m not one to talk. We were all young and dumb. I mean, that time I broke my hand Rollerblading . . . drunk? Oh, let’s not forget Kim’s Lisa Bonet phase? That girl, I tell you.”

A wistful somberness creeps in when Neisha says That girl, so subtle only Cora would notice it, and she does but just barely because she’s lost in thought. A revelation, really. I have to go backward before I can go forward. That’s how she’ll get the answers she needs. She must relive it all, retrace her steps—their steps, really, hers and Aaron’s and Lincoln’s—and it will help her find the way. Like a turn-of-the-century explorer painstakingly cataloging miles of waterways and inlets to locate the source of a river, driven by faith that these discoveries will have broader implications and tangible applications. Her own trip down memory lane will surely reveal something important about how the world—and her heart—works. It will offer a map leading her straight to the right man, the right life, the right choice.

“You know what? What’s past is prologue, Ne-ne.”

Again, Cora barely registers what Neisha mumbles: “Ah, shit, you’re over here dropping some vague Shakespeare mumbo jumbo? If anything, you need to be summoning Oprah right about now . . . or Jesus.”

She doesn’t—can’t—respond because she’s already floating years and miles away. Cora Belle has gone back to the beginning.

All the Men I've Loved Again, by Christine Pride will be released on July 8, 2025. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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