by Lydia Davis
First published 2014
A woman cannot stop thinking about a relationship that has ended. She decides to write about it, believing that putting the experience into words will help her understand and control her fixation. As she attempts to reconstruct what happened, she analyzes every detail with surgical precision. She examines her own behavior and motivations with brutal self-awareness. The act of writing becomes both a method of investigation and a form of torment. She dissects memories of conversations, encounters, and emotions with the same intensity that originally fueled her obsession. Her narrative shifts between sharp observations about human nature and vivid descriptions of the physical world around her. The more she writes, the more complex her feelings become. Davis creates a narrator who is simultaneously analytical and consumed, clear-eyed and trapped. The woman's attempt to gain mastery over her emotional life through storytelling reveals the stubborn persistence of desire and the limits of rational control.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, psychological-thriller
Vibes: intimate, introspective, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-study, unreliable-narrator
148 pages · ebook · Farrar, Straus and Giroux