I have been listening to the New York Times Book Review podcast for about five years. It has been the source of many of the reviews here. I would not have read a great deal of the books here had I not listened. The first was Avid Reader. It took a bit while longer for there to be a second, and truthfully, Avid Reader was not discussed on the podcast--Robert Gottlieb just appeared on it--and so The House of Broken Angels was arguably the first. Less came two months later, though that selection may have been swayed by the New Yorker Radio Hour (but the NYTBRP, if anyone calls it that, is far superior). We will leave the Paris Review podcast alone, which is highly stylized and niche, releasing only a few episodes a year, but that one led me to Homesick for Another World. I then stepped away.
I stepped away and retired the blog to focus on more creative pursuits. Yet 5 months later, I settled on the idea of "short form" reviews, which were relatively painless to write. That first return included both Asymmetry and Sabrina. A few months after that, The Great Believers showed up in short-form. Early in 2020, Conversations with Friends and She Said shared space. Trick Mirror could not just have been discussed on the New Yorker Radio Hour, it had to have made it onto the NYTBRP. And it was there that the short-form died and the long-form returned. There were too many things I wanted to say about certain books.
As the pandemic hit, The Night of the Gun provided good company. Later that summer, I found the book I would recommend randomly to other people more than any other (and its follow-up). And I might have read Catch and Kill regardless of the podcast (to be completist), but I would not likely have found Indelicacy. Or Cleanness, for that matter. I had heard of Trust Exercise from other sources, but I feel this had to be discussed on the program, and I know for certain this was the case for Fake Accounts.
So those amount to about 15 different posts out of 420 (yes that is where we currently stand). It's only 3.5% of the total (which seems like almost nothing) but truly, many of these posts represent the best of the criticism on the blog. I daresay no single other source has inspired more.
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I start here because I want this review to be something of an homage to Ms. Paul. While every element of the podcast is excellent--the two author interviews, the news from the publishing world, the historical items from the Book Review--the final segment ("the latest in literary criticism" or "what we and the staff have been reading") is often the most amusing. On her penultimate episode, she offered this book as the recommendation--one her colleague (and now successor) John Williams had read and recommended earlier, closer to the time it was published.
I do not disagree with their recommendation (which was, to be sure, somewhat qualified). I picked up this book because I had a hard time with the limited other titles I'd digested (primarily Maybe You Should Talk to Someone) dealing in similar territory, and I wanted to believe that a psychologist or psychoanalyst could write about their work in an interesting and artful way. So many people do not seek help out of a sense of weakness, or fear, and so books such as these are extremely valuable. If the reader cannot work with another person to learn something about themselves, there is always the chance they can learn something about themselves through literature. But books such as this clearly do not belong in the self-help category.
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It is easiest to compare this to [Lori] Gottlieb's book because they are a study in contrasts. That book was too long for me. This book isn't too short for me, but just right, at 215 (small) pages. That book delves into a lot of relationship issues from the author's own life (it is as much personal memoir as "work memoir"). This book has limited few of those. That book focuses primarily on four different patients and the evolution of their treatment. This book focuses on dozens of patients, and confines each to one chapter. There are more differences still, but the biggest (and the one that matters to me most) is the quality of the writing.
Grosz's style is pithy. It almost seem as though he is making fun of his patients when he writes about them. Clearly, he is not. But there is so much ambiguous humor in here that one may do double-takes.
It is also casually erudite, for example, when it contains a passage which moved me greatly, particularly as I read it to a person in a similar stance (that is, Felice's):
"For a moment he seemed lost in the contemplation of something visible only to him and then he said, 'Do you know the story of Kafka and Felice Bauer? For five years, Kafka was intensely involved with Bauer, sometimes sending her several letters a day. She lived in Berlin, he lived in Prague--not a great distance even then, but during the five years they were engaged, they met only ten times, often for no more than an hour or two.' If you read Kafka's letters, Michael said, it's clear that he was distraught--anxious about where Felice was going, who she was seeing, what she was eating or wearing. Kafka wanted instant replies to his letters, and he was furious when he didn't get them. He proposed twice and broke it off twice--the wedding never took place. Michael said that for Kafka, separation from Bauer was unbearable. 'The only thing more disturbing was her presence.
'Kafka got into that sort of relationship over and over again,' he told me. 'Nowadays, we'd say he was schizoid or suffered some mild form of Asperger's, but those words give no sense of the central thing. The person he most avoided was the person upon whom he was the most dependent--the person he most wanted." (50-51)
This is from the chapter titled "On not being in a couple," which Pamela mentioned (along with "How praise can cause a loss of confidence," and maybe "How paranoia can relieve suffering and prevent a catastrophe"), perhaps to underscore the nature of its literary style. I daresay there is something Nietzschean about it, but I did not read the entirety of Ecce Homo. Suffice to say, there are lessons to be learned in life that we can sometimes whittle down into bite-sized morsels of universal truth. It might be more accurate to call it Montaignean (though that is not apparently a word), maybe Montaigne-esque.
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The book touches on many topics and illnesses: grief, imaginary problems, irrational behaviors, incomprehensible violence, disappointment, boredom, autism/Asperger's, HIV/AIDS, dreams, envy and love, to name a few.
"Loving" is one of the 5 sections that comprise the book. The others are "Beginnings," "Telling Lies," "Changing," and "Leaving." (Nitpicky note: I would remove the S from Beginnings.) Indeed the subject of love is essential in psychoanalysis and plays into many other facets of living and surviving in this world (statistics bear out that being in a couple leads to increased longevity). In my own psychiatric sessions over the past 8 years, "love" and the status of various friends and partners has taken up a significant portion of our time. So while I am not an expert, I was particularly intrigued by "How lovesickness keeps us from love." (Nitpicky note #2: I don't know how I feel about the lowercase chapter titles.)
About three months ago, shortly before Valentine's Day, I discovered a new term: limerence. For all intents and purposes, "lovesickness" is an appropriate synonym for limerence, yet I feel there are slight differences. Limerence contains its own vocabulary, and we do not consider people "crushes," but rather, "LOs." We recognize ourselves as limerent individuals because our relationships follow similar patterns: (1) intense crush and placement of LO on pedestal; (2) extraordinary happiness at reciprocated feelings; (3) extreme depression at lack of reciprocation; (4) locking into dynamic of misaligned expectations of relationship; (5) texts and communications from LO take on magnified importance; (6) obsession/infatuation with LO; (7) no contact ("NC") with LO as necessary self-care; (8) breaking NC with LO, revisiting relationship, restarting cycle.
We see limerence in society as something to shun and demonize. We consider them "stalkers" and presume they lack self-control or any sense of boundaries. They are, effectively, one of the "lower forms" of human beings. We consider them "toxic" and "unstable." I have not watched "My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" (though I keep telling myself I will) but that archetypal figure is the poster child for limerence. We keep irrationally hoping that we can get back together and everything will be magically better this time.
So it was heartening to read something so precise here:
"Most of us have come down with a case of lovesickness at one time or another, suffering its fever to a greater or lesser degree. In severe cases, lovesickness can lead to delusional behaviors (stalking, for example) or sexual obsession. When we are lovesick, we feel that our emotional boundaries, the walls between us and the object of our desire, have fallen away. We feel a weighty physical longing, an ache. We believe that we are in love.
Many psychoanalysts think that lovesickness is a form of regression, that in longing for intense closeness, we are like infants craving our mother's embrace. This is why we are most at risk when we are struggling with loss or despair, or when we are lonely and isolated--it is not uncommon to fall in love during the first term of university, for example. But are these feelings really love?
'I sometimes say--but not entirely seriously--that infatuation is the exciting bit at the beginning; real love is the boring bit that comes later,' the poet Wendy Cope once told me. 'People who are lovesick put off testing their fantasies against reality.' But given the anguish that lovesickness can cause--the loss of mental freedom, the dissatisfaction with one's self, and the awful ache--why do some of us put off facing reality for so long?
Often it's because facing reality means accepting loneliness. And while loneliness can be useful--motivating us to meet someone new, for example--a fear of loneliness can work like a trap, ensnaring us in heartsick feelings for a very long time. At its worst, lovesickness becomes a habit of mind, a way of thinking about the world that is not altogether dissimilar to paranoia." (110-111)
Grosz then later goes into an illuminating discussion of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and makes the point that we cannot redo the past or be certain of the future--change can only take place in the here and now, and sometimes we change most when we repair our relation to the lost, the forgotten, the dead. While this passage was not a cure for limerence, it presented a different way of looking at the problem, a different perspective to take, and so I at least personally found it helpful, along with many other such moments in the book--when Grosz steps back from a specific discussion of x patient and makes larger observations about humanity as a whole, drawing from personal experience with numerous other individuals he has seen that do not star in their own "mini-feature" in this book. And it is this type of "wisdom" that makes the book a valuable resource for anyone, and especially for those experiencing trauma or any other great upheavals in their lives.
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Today (last Friday, really), Jennifer Egan appeared as a guest on the NYTBRP. I haven't read Manhattan Beach or A Visit from the Goon Squad, but they are a couple I've considered, waiting for one to reach out and grab me, from word-of-mouth or a chance twisting-of-the-arm. She was talking about her follow-up, The Candy House. I am not sure how often I will listen to the podcast (query whether many podcast listeners continue on after their host moves on), but I still consider the newspaper (for all of its recent questionable op-eds and headlines) one of the preeminent outlets of literary criticism. Pamela will still appear as a guest, sometimes, and while Egan's voice was the first one to be heard on this episode (which was never the case with Pamela as host), I did appreciate Williams and what he had to say about his recent selections (he is in fact responsible for this choice), and so I think he will be a fine host as well. It just remains to be seen what interesting and new directions he can take the show.
As for Grosz, we should all be so lucky to have our therapy turned into literature, etched into history and the understanding of human beings in general. In this way, he has succeeded, and avoided the fate of several other psychiatrists and psychologists before him, whose books were longwinded and boring. This really cut to the chase and didn't waste any time getting into the philosophy of his practice. It might help other practitioners refine their practice, and it might help those that seek them out to become better patients. It may, also, lead to conversations that can change lives and reconfigure destinies. For all of these reasons, it is worth checking out (and so is the NYTBRP).
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