The author, who entranced readers with her candor in Blackout (2015), a memoir of her years of alcoholism, brings the same unsparing honesty to her search for true love. She explains that in her 20s, she chose a big, unconventional life: adventure, a career, and the things unavailable to her mother, whose \u201csmall radius\u201d existence Hepola semi-pitied, always assuming this path \u201cwould double back at some point and deliver\u201d her to a husband and a child. Instead, at 45, in a therapist\u2019s office, chronically single, she looks back at the three loves that \u201chaunted\u201d her: \u201ca detective in New Orleans, a married man, a younger man,\u201d each of whom \u201croamed just beyond her fingertips.\u201d The book unfolds in three parts, one per man. First comes the married man, a friend turned something more, who proves surprisingly the steadiest and most emotionally present of the three until it becomes clear that he and his wife define the flexibility in their marriage differently. Part two belongs to the younger man, 29 to Hepola\u2019s 44, met on Tinder; once she gets past her disbelief that he wants her, she falls hard for his movie-star looks and his life on a locomotive-factory line, so unlike her own. Part three revisits the great love of her 20s, the detective, who dumped her unceremoniously and resurfaces decades later. She still finds him magnetic, though her sobriety now casts his drinking in a stark light. It\u2019s he who hands her the book\u2019s title, in a line that becomes its thesis: Desire feeds only on distance. Fans of Blackout will recognize the same fearless honesty and propulsive readability. The tone is so casual, so conversational, that it\u2019s easy to miss just how good a writer Hepola is: The prose is precise even when it\u2019s taking risks, unexpected turns of phrase landing with the ease of a friend talking you through her worst nights.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The author, who entranced readers with her candor in Blackout (2015), a memoir of her years of alcoholism, brings the same unsparing honesty to her search for true love. She explains that in her 20s, she chose a big, unconventional life: adventure, a career, and the things unavailable to her mother, whose \u201csmall radius\u201d existence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7396"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}