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circlepines's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
CW: mentions of cancer, depression, suicidal ideation, sexuality/kink, and psychotherapy
The cheap reduction of this book is "a woman with breast cancer writes a memoir about her connection with her therapist." Someone who picks this up expecting an emotionally straightforward narrative along those lines will probably find this intolerably navel-gazey. Better reasons to pick up this book (in no particular order) would be:
a) An intrinsic interest in the life and work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
b) An interest in intimate, voyeuristic dissection of the therapist-client relationship
c) A desire to receive vicarious psychotherapy around some of the issues that EKS explores in her therapy -- which, for the most part, are less around her cancer diagnosis(until the end) and more about living with chronic depression and suicidal ideation; the experience of growing up gifted in a family that does not recognize your fundamental child-like needs because of your adult-like intellect; disentangling the dysfunctional patterns of emotional expression that you learned from your parents; and integrating sexuality (particularly kink and fantasy) with your greater sense of self.
Probably the most thematically similar book I've read is Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, in its intense focus on dynamics of psychotherapy. In both books, there are moments when the authors struggle to differentiate what was personally meaningful to them in their therapy, and what may be interesting to a broader audience. What save A Dialogue on Love from becoming too self-obsessed are the interwoven excerpts from her therapist's session notes. Although this provides a second voice, it doesn't quite create a "dialogue" -- more like two parallel perspectives that sometimes run closely together, sometimes diverge, but never quite touch. It is fascinating to read how EKS and Shannon (her therapist) narrate particularly challenging sessions through their own frames.
At the same time, Shannon's notes were clearly written on the fly for personal reference and are largely unedited, so they don't always present a coherent narrative. This becomes more of an issue later in the book, when EKS stops journaling about her therapy in the same level of detail, and there are pages at a time that are entirely in Shannon's voice -- e.g.:
The cheap reduction of this book is "a woman with breast cancer writes a memoir about her connection with her therapist." Someone who picks this up expecting an emotionally straightforward narrative along those lines will probably find this intolerably navel-gazey. Better reasons to pick up this book (in no particular order) would be:
a) An intrinsic interest in the life and work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
b) An interest in intimate, voyeuristic dissection of the therapist-client relationship
c) A desire to receive vicarious psychotherapy around some of the issues that EKS explores in her therapy -- which, for the most part, are less around her cancer diagnosis
Probably the most thematically similar book I've read is Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, in its intense focus on dynamics of psychotherapy. In both books, there are moments when the authors struggle to differentiate what was personally meaningful to them in their therapy, and what may be interesting to a broader audience. What save A Dialogue on Love from becoming too self-obsessed are the interwoven excerpts from her therapist's session notes. Although this provides a second voice, it doesn't quite create a "dialogue" -- more like two parallel perspectives that sometimes run closely together, sometimes diverge, but never quite touch. It is fascinating to read how EKS and Shannon (her therapist) narrate particularly challenging sessions through their own frames.
At the same time, Shannon's notes were clearly written on the fly for personal reference and are largely unedited, so they don't always present a coherent narrative. This becomes more of an issue later in the book, when EKS stops journaling about her therapy in the same level of detail, and there are pages at a time that are entirely in Shannon's voice -- e.g.:
Short skirts -- tickling -- sexual sensations -- violence -- Ouija board (focus dissipates) What do you think? (Suggest she stay with the sexual feelings and thoughts) Sensations -- Tyler talking about locker rooms as a kid, the fantasy of a line of boys being spanked by gym coach -- warm space of attention and love -- notes constriction in chest, losing touch with lower body -- hard to think/talk about. (p. 201)
It's harder to find a sense of cohesive meaning here. Oddly, these excerpts of Shannon's notes are the places where the book feels the most self-preoccupied -- since they were clearly selected for their resonance for EKS, rather than their comprehensibility to the reader.
EKS's portions of the narrative are written in haibun, a Japanese form that combines prose with haiku. I wasn't familiar with this form and initially found the choice of haiku to be a little cloying -- redeemed by the fact that they so effortlessly and elegantly integrate with the prose. EKS explicitly discusses the choice of form toward the end of the book, noting that it's classically used for travel narratives (so the metaphor here is obvious) and that although haiku can be "precious, insipid," she was inspired by a James Merrill piece about his travel in Japan:
Spangled with haiku is more what it feels like, his very sentences fraying
into implosions
of starlike density or
radiance, then out
into a prose that's never quite not the poetry -- (p. 194)
She does achieve the same effect quite skillfully here.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Medical trauma, Death, Medical content, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, Fatphobia, Grief, Terminal illness, Body shaming, and Cancer
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