Modern Love

I have a yearly goal of reading 52 books, and the single life most certainly does not get in the way of it. Last night, I slept with Harvey Pekar beside me.

Weeks ago, I read Modern Love, a collection of 50 essays from The New York Times column of the same name. The essays run the gamut - from marriage to dating to the death of a spouse. Lots of good breakup stuff, too.

I was truly sad when my brief affair with Modern Love was over, but I’m looking for a rebound. Here are some excerpts:

“I wanted her back so bad it gave me a stomachache. But I remembered with distress the times she had accused me of whining. I struggled over the last line for twenty minutes. I decided on ‘Write back if you want, but you don’t need to feel obliged.’

She didn’t feel obliged. Which made me want to call her. Which made me want to have sex with her. Which made me want to wake up next to her, to grow old with her. Or to see her age and grow fat and ugly very quickly.

‘She’s dead to me,’ I told my friends. ‘I was mentally ill to have dated her,’ I told my friends. ‘Obviously a borderline personality,’ I told my friends.

‘Why did I throw away the best thing I ever had?’ I wrote in my journal. ‘Please, God, bring her back.’”
-Steve Friedman

*

“Sometimes, lying here, I think of this divorce business as something like the flu. The feverish beginnings, as miserable and sweaty as they are, are somehow easier to get through (they are a blur, really) than the many half-well, half-sick days that follow, days when you’re not sure what to do. You’re too well to lie in bed watching TV but too sick to go out and do all the things well people are expected to do.”
-Theo Pauline Nestor

*

“Me, I like to look at things once, twice, again and again. When I was a little girl, my father, a chemical engineer, told me if you chew a piece of bland bread over and over, holding it in your mouth, it eventually becomes sweet. He was trying to explain to me about the breakdown of the molecules into glucose and such.

But what sticks in my mind is the deeper meaning I saw in what he’d said: how anything, any experience, conversation, scene observed, or moment reflected upon, is like that piece of bland bread. Look at it a while, chew it, hold it, and it becomes sweet and satisfying. There are hidden surprises and hidden flavors residing in everything and everybody.”
-Renee Watabe

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