The Tamesis
Most people have experienced heartbreak at least once. Some of us, the lucky ones, experience heartbreak multiple times as if we were engaging in an extreme sport. But you’ll also learn a lot about yourself in the process, and you’ll almost always be grateful that it happened in the first place.
However, romantic movies, books, and TV shows can make you want to vomit while you’re in it. So, this Valentine’s Day, here’s a list of all the best books to read if you don’t feel like reading think Stories about people who are happily in love—from vicious divorce memoirs to vivid explorations of enjoying single life.
When does a happy marriage turn into an ugly divorce? If we were going through every stage of couple life together, when would we notice things starting to gel? This is essentially what Belle Burden attempts to address in her memoir of marriage, strangerIn it, she digs into her previously “perfect” relationship to try to find out why her husband suddenly wanted out after 20 years. This is a great book for the nosy and curious, as well as for those caught off guard by a divorce or breakup. Originally from a viral article in Modern Love new york times, stranger Beautifully written too.
If you managed to survive the first half of the 2020s, no one asked: “Have you read it? on all fours Miranda Jolie? ! “Good job then. If you haven’t, then…have you read it?” on all fours Miranda July? ! If the answer is no, then…why not? ! At its heart, this book is more of a story of self-discovery than a book about heartbreak, on all fours This is a brilliant and quirky account of a woman trying to dive headfirst into her sexuality – and, more broadly, what it means to be alive – during menopause. The actual breakup is just a footnote in this wayward tale of exploration, motel renovations, inappropriate crushes and truly bizarre sexual behavior. July pushes the autobiographical fiction genre to new extremes.
Olivia Laing writes engagingly about everything from the whiskey-rotten livers of John Cheever and Raymond Carver, to the pastel abstractions of Agnes Martin, the medlars and magnolias of her own Suffolk garden, to the mid-century craze for Wilhelm Reich’s “orgone.” Equal parts memoir and criticism, her 2016 lonely city is a study of loneliness and the shame that comes with it—written after falling “hastily and too hastily” into a relationship, the sudden breakdown of which sent her into an emotional free fall (and then bouncing from one sublet to another in New York City). “There are things that fascinate me, not just as an individual but as a citizen of our century, our pixelated age,” she wrote. “What does it mean to be alone? How are we supposed to live without close contact with another human being?” She found the answer while considering the works of Edward Hopper, David Wojnarovich and Henry Darger.
After a year and a half of quarantine in her Manhattan studio at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, single, childless and horny Glynnis MacNicol, 46, fled to Paris for a month, where she devoted herself to a guilt-free pursuit of sensual pleasure: with 27 people she met through the dating app Fruitz having a one-night stand with a 20-year-old woman; tracking down the addresses of Lee Miller and Edith Wharton in Paris; through a steady diet of rosé and cheese; playing François (François Boucher’s) along the Seine and in the cool, echoing rooms of the Louvre. maid will be the cover of the memoir). That’s it – that’s what this book is about – every page is more interesting like a cannelé.
Amy Key, a poet in her forties, had been single for 22 years when she wrote this poem. blue arrangementwhich is loosely structured from 10 tracks from Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album. The following pages are dedicated to “anyone who needs a love story for some alone time,” exploring the lights and shadows of life outside of the “sacred status” and “assumed structures” provided by a monogamous partnership. If you’re looking for soothing platitudes, this is not the book to read: “The saying that you must love yourself before you can expect others to love you can feel like a terrible burden,” she once wrote. Instead, Key mines every emotional stress point associated with being single and ultimately provides a sense of release. “I wanted to overthrow the centrality of romantic love and hierarchy as opposed to love,” she concludes. “I want romantic love while valuing what I have and being content without it.”
After the ‘private earthquake’ of a breakup, Shon Faye, ” transgender issuesa double blow to herself, breaking her belief that she “cannot practice the skill of love correctly”. “I think these two belief systems have had the greatest impact on my view of love and have caused me the most pain,” she reflects. “First, the belief that love is instinctive, simple, and transformative…Second, the happiness of love is achieved in heterosexuality.” Throughout love in exileOver the course of the book’s eight sprawling chapters, she attempts to reconnect with her own mind and consider the struggle between “traditional heterosexual” attraction and repulsion, an exploration filled with detours that include a paean to Lana Del Rey. norman fucking rockwell And a shot back at Jermaine Grier female eunuchmemories of queer club nights in Oxford, and a look back at her experience dating “alternative hip” boys with numerous philosophy degrees.
Diana Athill was an extremely astute editor of Philip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, VS Naipaul and others, and before her death aged 101, she wrote at least nine memoirs. Her first album was released in 1962, instead of a letterfrom her childhood in her 30s at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk to her career in the London publishing world of the Swinging Sixties, aims to answer an elusive question: As someone who “missed the chance to marry and have children”, what was she living for? The mission forces her to re-examine a revealing romance with an RAF pilot and consider how the brutal end of their engagement set her on a different path to achievement. “From this table, with a white teacup next to me, a filled ashtray and a shot glass half full of rum, I saw my story, ordinary as it all was, sad as it was mostly, as a success story,” she writes at the end of the book. “I’m 43 years old and I’m happier than ever and more interested in the future.”
Further reading…
“As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we end the story.” Thus begins Deborah Levy’s account of the years around her 50th birthday, when her marriage fell apart and she moved on to “a new way of life.”
FashionThe former sex columnist draws on the works of writers from Plato to bell hooks to create a forensic yet emotional study of centuries of heartbreak.
This vengeful, vicious, bizarre, addictive portrait of a heterosexual marriage gone horribly wrong. This is a great book for anyone who’s ever wondered why two people who hate each other got married in the first place (or maybe you can relate too).
Jami Attenberg’s 2022 memoir, I came all the way to see yougrappling with the reality of a carefree life without a partner and children in order to devote yourself fully to your art. this middlestein family The author didn’t buy her first real bed until she was 45, and for more than thirty years she traveled back and forth across the United States, filling notebooks with ideas.
Leslie Jamison promises to be ‘the next Joan Didion’ as she publishes debut collection of essays empathy test2014; a decade later, her account of the collapse of her marriage after welcoming her daughter is itself a lesson in sensitivity and generosity.
“Marriage is a form of expression,” Rachel Cusk in as a result of. “It takes disorder and manifests it as order. It takes disparate things and turns them into one thing. It takes chaos, diversity, confusion, and turns them into form.” Her own divorce, then, represents the fragmentation of family, identity, life, a process Cusk dissects with the calmness and precision of a surgeon.
It’s a “thinly thinly veiled novel” about the breakdown of Efron’s first marriage in which Nora’s everything is a replica, and it’s as much about the infamous vinaigrette recipe as it is about a plethora of aphorisms: “Let’s face it: everyone on the planet is someone you shouldn’t be with.”
Annie Ernaux’s memoir masterpiece covers seventy years of her life and a reassessment of the nature and structure of memory… Alison Strayer’s English translation, published through Fitzcarraldo Editions, does more than justice to the Nobel Prize winner’s tense, impressionistic prose.
