This love is real: A non-fiction reading list
Editor’s note: Love is complicated, contentious and contradictory—as these novels, memoirs and analyses reveal. In other words, a perfect non-fiction antidote to the saccharine excess of the V-day weekend.
Written by: Diya Isha is an editor, writer, and book critic based in New Delhi. You can find her on Instagram @contendish
Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley: A thief breaks in and absconds with pieces of her insipid grandmother's jewellery—which Crosley had never cared for until the theft. Then her friend and ex-boss kills himself. The setting of a pandemic in New York City permits a correlation between these incidents in a surprisingly slim book. In a wry, often comical book that defies simple notions of heartache, Crosley's book unspools her brilliant quip: "Grief is for people, not things."
More by Molly Roden Winter: Our society confuses the ban on marrying more than one person with the inability of loving more than one person. This memoir follows Molly who signs up for dating sites, has passionate flings, and has sex in hotels and public places around New York City—and soon her husband Stewart embarks on his own adventures. This isn’t about the misery of a cuckold but an open marriage—-because in love, less is never more.
Henry and June by Anaïs Nin: The woman who finds herself as the 'other' in a love affair often wonders what will happen when the wife discovers the betrayal. Nin—caught between the fraught marriage of Henry and June Miller—moves like a pendulum between the two, finding herself repelled by the husband and enamoured with the wife, a voyeur to the volatility of their marriage—which informed many of Miller's novels. A marvel of a journal where you almost forget Nin's characters are real people.
Against Love by Laura Kipnis: Witty, accusatory, and tirelessly polemic, as the title of this book promises, Kipnis makes a stirring case against monogamy—how the ‘work’ of preserving a relationship often becomes a form of alienated labour. Weaving together political, cultural, and philosophical references, Kipnis efficiently and eloquently decimates the notion that 'love conquers all.'
Love and Lies by Clancy Martin: You lie more often to your lover than to your boss. And perhaps that's not such a bad thing, or so Martin would have you believe. This book is more memoir than an essay as Martin focuses more on himself than the subject at hand—like a guide who'd rather talk about himself than the sights. But the result is an entertaining read that offers the hard-worn wisdom and honesty of an author who is himself divorced twice and married three times.
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson: This is a memoir of the author’s relationship with Harry Dodge—a transperson who doesn’t, however, believe in binaries. This is also a domestic drama—the everydayness of love, complicated by punitive and suffocating social norms around identity and sexuality. About pregnancies, top surgeries—and yes, sex. Along the way, Nelson skewers a pantheon of thinkers from Jean Baudrillard to Slavoj Žižek.
I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider: I thought I'd end this book with the lightest read—one you can pick up anytime you want a laugh. Through a collection of comic strips, Snider sends up the inveterate reader: their never-ending TBR pile, easy seduction by second-hand bookstores, the difficulty of moving on from beloved but bad books, and the struggle to accept that you might not, after all, be able to complete that tome that won an award. How is this book about love, you ask? I ask: What love affair is more torturous, exhilarating and exhausting—especially to your bank balance— than one with the books?
