![]() Bendrix’s lovesickness is observed with heart-clenching accuracy, the way he waits for Sarah’s phone calls “with hope for company,” the way nights become unbearable-“A curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things we had done together,” Greene writes. But make no mistake: Greene’s subject is love at its most tormented. The book’s delightfully twisty plot is engrossing-Bendrix even hires a private detective, on the suggestion of Sarah’s husband, Henry, to tail her during her frequent disappearances. Afterward, Sarah wordlessly cut off their four-year affair. It’s been nearly two years since the night in June 1944 when they slept together and the Nazis bombed London. Maurice Bendrix just wants to know-urgently, jealously-what his lover, Sarah, has been up to. To the person I had slept next to on a thousand naked nights, I said, You’re the worst.” As Levy moves toward a future that’s both hopeful and entirely up in the air, it’s hard not to feel tenderness-for her, of course, and for everyone whose life has been touched by grief. “‘You’re the worst,’ I said once, and meant it,” she admits. Levy’s prose is immediate and often hilarious she writes about Lucy, her spouse, with a regret that wafts off the page and sparks tears. “My sorrow is so intense it often feels like it will flatten me.” What follows is an account of events so calamitous, they seem to Levy almost like divine retribution for a lifetime of heedless ambition: a gutting miscarriage on a reporting trip to Mongolia, her helpless period of obsession with a noxious ex and their ongoing affair, and the final, agonizing end of her marriage. “In the last few months, I have lost my son, my spouse, and my house,” she informs us. The opening pages of Ariel Levy’s memoir are a dispatch from deep within a waking nightmare. And despite their intimate understanding of the pain of heartbreak, they offer steadfast affirmation that love remains worth pursuing. The books below are both psychologically acute and genuinely insightful about the specific derangement of a separation. (Each unhappy family, etc.) But reading a book that manages to be eloquent about emotions that frequently render one inarticulate makes it possible to be gentle with yourself. ![]() It can be easy to get lost in the particularities of your own doomed love and become convinced that no one’s ever gone through what you’re enduring. The great Russian novelist understood.ĭuring a breakup, when being alone takes on a new rawness and intensity, the need to find your own life reflected in works of art is never greater. My own ex’s inability to handle emotions was all there. ![]() Anna’s husband completely loses his powers of reasoning whenever he sees a woman cry: “The emotional distress wrought in Alexey Alexandrovich by tears on such occasions would find expression in a rapid loss of temper,” Leo Tolstoy writes. “It gratified him to feel like a desperate man,” Willa Cather writes of the surly husband, Frank, in O Pioneers! “His unhappy temperament was like a cage he could never get out of it and he felt that other people, his wife in particular, must have put him there.” Yes, yes, that was exactly how he was! I thought, scribbling down the quote.Įven the smallest moment in Anna Karenina, that breakup classic, could conjure visions of misery. ![]() For years after my last failed relationship, I would hoard lines from books that seemed to describe my ex perfectly and devastatingly. ![]()
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