Exciting news: one of our favorite writers, Tim Kreider, has a new book coming out on Valentine’s Day, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. (Word has it, he gives us a little hat-tip in there…!) For a refresher on why this is exciting, consider this timeless little passage from his essay, “The Creature Walks Among Us”:
Whenever I overhear someone talking on a cell phone about an illicit affair or excruciating divorce, or read the anguished confessions on postsecret.com or the hopeless mash notes in the “missed connections” ads, it feels like a glimpse into the secret history of the world. It belies the consensual pretense that the main thing going on in this life is work and the making of money. I love it when passion rips open that dull nine-to-five facade and bares the writhing orgy of need underneath…
My friend Lauren once told me that she could totally understand–which is not the same as sympathize with–those losers who kill their exes and/or their exes’ new lovers, that black, annihilating If-I-can’t-have-her-no-one-else-will impulse, because it’s so painful to know that the person you love is still out there in the world, living her life, going to work and laughing with friends and drinking margaritas. It’s a lesser hurt than grief, but, in a way, crueler–it’s more like being dead yourself, and having to watch life go on without you. I loved her for owning up to this. Not that Lauren or I–or you–would ever do any such thing ourselves.
But I sometimes wonder whether the line between those of us who don’t do such things and the few who do is as impermeable as we like to think. Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clicking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day? It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.
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