WARNING: If you wish to read A Very Long Engagement and want to be surprised, DO NOT read the following post

I just finished A Very Long Engagement and in the end the girl finds her missing soldier lover (quell suprise!) But he has amnesia. He has no recollection of his life with her before the war and has begun a new life as the "son" of a woman whose own real son died in the war (his parents died shortly after the war). In the end she determines to rekindle her love affair with him, simply telling him that she is a woman he was in love with before the war ... And never telling him about his old life.

What prompts me to write about this trumped up dime store romance novel is that I can't decide if she is truly devoted or selfish beyond all reason.
He doesn't remember her. He is no longer the man she loved. Yes, it is her love in body, but the mind of her love is long gone. So, is she showing true, deep devotion to her love because she loves him despite the fact that he has no recollection of her and is so deeply changed? OR is she a selfish fool to love the body of a man who died in the war? I don't know...

If it was Lee ... Would it be better to leave him in his new life and mourn him as dead? Or try to love the new person he has become and hope that the love between the New Lee and myself has the same qualities as our old love? What misery it would be to love the new Lee as if he is the old Lee ... To try to pretend that he isn't a new person. To love only the memory of someone projected on to another seems cruel to all involved.

The book seems to suggest that she is showing the deepest loyalty, love and faithfulness ... But I am not sure that it isn't desperation, bitterness, and arrogance.