A review by melissamaerz
Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner

5.0

Written by a 28-year-old Yale grad who seems much younger than that, though I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult. This book is about a chapter of her life that she calls a “second adolescence,” though it really feels like a first adolescence, a time when the most important thing you can imagine is whether or not you might break up with someone and start dating someone else, and whether you can apply Audre Lorde quotes directly to that experience. And yet, for all my eye-rolling, I kind of loved it? So willfully dramatic, so insistent upon the idea that this ordinary relationship is *so wildly romantic,* and yet, such a fantastic, playful form (couplets!) that made me think more about expectation and repetition in language and in relationships. Plus it was legitimately fun to read, a bit like Madam Bovary, if Flaubert’s heroine were a cool kid from Brooklyn.