Intellectualizing Emotions and Human Connection

Hi, I'm Alyssa Adwarney and you're listening to NPR's Book of the Day. Okay, we've got a fun twist for you today. Two fiction books about love, well, kind of. In a moment, we'll get to this incredible book called The End of R omance by Lily Meyer . It's actually maybe more of like an anti romance novel. Honestly, after I read this book, I could not stop thinking about it. But first, an actual love story, or I should say, multiple love stories, since the book explores the world of Polyamory . It's called They All Fall In Love At The End by Halle Blasing and she spoke with NPR's Wanna Summers . This next story is about love. Kat and Jay together for six years after falling for each other in college . They open their relationship at Kat's insistence and Jay is reluctant . And that love story quickly becomes love stories plural . Hailey Blasengame's new novel They All Fall in Love at the End takes on questions of polyamory from the point of view of a woman who can't be tied down to one person . Blassengame minded her own story of non mon ogamy for the novel. It's a story she told years ago in an essay for the New York Times modern love column. When it was published, I got a lot of hate interesting, particularly from men on the internet. And I was warned of this by the editor like you will get hate . And so Kat is, she's not me, but we share a lot of traits . And I think she's very root in the tradition of doing what she wants. Some might call her unlikable. I don't necessarily see as unlikeable, but she's certainly concerned about self actualization with a kind of bravado that I don't know if we always see from young black women, which is why I want to write that type of character. And I think it makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable, particularly men . Okay, give me one example of a way that you are like Kat or identify with her and one example of a way that maybe you guys aren't so much like. Okay, so I did give her a lot of my demographic details. She's a young black woman. She is a DC native. Her mom is a federal worker . She worked in a kind of crappy restaurant. I did that too . And it was an in open relationship. So like those biographical details are the same, but like the events of the story are not my life. So I definitely did not like get with my boyfriend's best friend and his girlfriend. Like that never happened just to put that on the record . And you know, my parents are divorced. So I just sort of re like it's like an alternative version of my life. I wanted to like use characters as like dolls and play around. Like what if this had happened though? I mean, as listeners of all things considered know, I love reading romance novels. I love reading a literary romance, but I have to say, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, this is the first time I've ever encountered a black woman who's polymorrised on the page. I wonder if that's your exper ience . Yes, absolutely. I mean, as a writer, I find myself in search for myself in stories and movies in shows. And that was what I was doing. I was trying to find a map to figure out how do I do this thing that I have not seen anyone like me really doing? Now when we meet Kat, she and her partner Jay, they're about six months into opening up their relationship and it's clear that they're still in the messy middle of trying to figure out how all of this works, if all of this work s. And early in the book, Kat says that even though they've opened things up, she still feels as lost as ever. I wonder was there something specific about polyamory that she wanted to crack open or explore or unpack with your book ? Yeah, I mean to return to this question of like the types of stories that get told around polymory, I wanted to see someone wrestling with it as a paradigm and as a mod ality like a relationship modality, not simply as Hey girl, there's this crazy thing I'm doing. And I think we typically talk about it as being an antagonist to monogamy or an answer to monogamy rather than just simply a different way of loving. And I think you almost have to you have to unlearn and then relearn in order to practice it in the way that I mean, I don't want to say should practice it because you can practice them in different ways. But like, you know , if you have zero models or zero examples of it, I mean and you find this a lot in the queer community too. It's like you're building something from scratch and I wanted to get into that piece of it , not just as a salacious plot point, but actually as like a philosophical relationship paradigm . Now as you've said, you are not cat, cat is not you, but I do wonder given some of the parallels between your life and her fictional life, did writing this book change at all the way you think about your own romantic life or even how we think about or talk about polyamory . The funny thing about writing a book is it takes so long. So I started this when I was twenty five, I'm thirty now, which doesn't sound like a huge gap, but thirty really is a lot of life happens in between twenty five and thirty. Listen, I'm like a different person. I'm like having health issues , back problems. Like I'm like, I don't even know what I was talking like the idea that I was going to have three boyfriends, I can't even find one boyfriend. I mean , so that's the funny thing about having to talk about this book now after having changed so much like the material conditions of my life are not the same as they were at twenty five. And so I can respect this book for what it is and the person I was when I wrote it. I'm not practicing polyamory anymore. I've been single for like three years. I'm dealing with, like I said, health issues. So my vision for love changed dramatically , but I still am not grasping girl. And I think now it's like I'm at the second leg of the race right the thirties grasping of like what am I going to do about kids? Is that gonna happen? You know, those questions, which I think is a natural progression of aging. So I don't really see it as invalidating any of the questions I was asking at twenty five, but I got some answers and now different questions are niggling at me. Yeah. Now this book takes place here in Washington, DC. You're a DC native. We both work here in the district and through cats' eyes we experience a lot of what all of us went through together in twenty twenty four. There was the election of President Trump for a second term, on campus protests, fears of immigration enforcement raids. What did you want people to feel and experience about the way things felt in our nation's capital at that time? Oh, I love this question because I do see this book more than just about n arrative but archival work . And I think D. C. was really , I would say, ground zero for the second Trump administration for we saw what was going to happen other parts of the country in many ways. And I wanted to capture that sense of one lived history, but also it was a frenetic energy. It was something was happening every day. I mean, a plane crashed into the potomac. It was after decades that hadn't happened. And it was a certain feeling of like the ground shifting beneath your feet and everyone you know . I can't have this conversation with you without mentioning that you also a part' ofre our public radio family . You're a producer for our member station WAMU here in DC and I get to work with some really cool producers so I know how busy that job is. And I wonder were there parts of your day job that you brought along with you as you were writing this book or was it maybe sort of more of a reprieve or a step back from the daily news grind that we both know? I mean, that was part of the problem was I couldn't step back. And so I was trying to write and I don't know if I've had this experience writing fiction before, but in this in this time, I was trying to write a novel and I could not turn my brain off . And so it seeped into the book. And that's part of what happened. I was like, I just can't pivot in the way that I'm used to pivoting. And so, you know, it is a privilege to be apart from politics. You know, people are pulled into politics every day because of who they are, whether they're following the news or not. And so I think that was also part of it as a journalist. I mean, it was just like baking in my head every day. That was my outlet because I have to be a certain way in the newsroom , but in the novel , I could engage with the news in a different light in a different way. Haley Blasengame is the author of They All Fall in Love At The End. Thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you so much. I'm in love with you but it's okay Next we've got a book called The End of Romance by Lily Meyer. It's a novel about a woman who leaves an emotionally abusive marriage and crafts a new philosophy about life and love that she and others will only find happiness and liberation when romance has been eradicated. And then of course that, philosophy is tested. I dogged with Meyer for here and now. Part romance, part philosophy, a new novel explores how the two intermingle. The story follows Sylvie Broder. Her grandparents are holocaust survivors , her parents are cold and rigid, and she marries her high school sweetheart, who ends up being controlling and emotionally abusive. After she escapes the marriage, she turns to philosophy for answers, pursuing a Ph D in the subject. Her dissertation centers on her theory about the end of romance, but real life, hookups, boyfriends, and yes, romance poke holes in her carefully crafted intellectual armor. Lily Meyer is the author of the book The End of Romance and joins us now. Hi Lily. Hi, thank you so much for having me . So I wonder where did the idea for this novel come from? It actually has a very specific origin story, which is not generally the case for my work , but in twenty eighteen or nineteen , I picked up a copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies of Love Story from a little free library , having never read Singer before and could not belie ve that novel. It's the story of a Holocaust survivor named Herman Broder comes to the United States , winds up having essentially three wives in three different boroughs of New York and decides the worst imaginable thing has happened. I have survived it. History is over , morals are meaningless. Why shouldn't I have three wives? Why shouldn't I go behind these women's back . Nothing matters. And singer starts out playing this for laughs and then it gets really dark. It's just a very striking book and I was jealous and I wanted to have written it. So I decided that I would do a gender flipped contemporary rewrite exploring issues trauma and resilience and bad behavior related to me too, because when I read the book, we were really in me too and I really wanted to think about it. Okay, so you've switched the gender roles and your main character is a woman named Sylvie Broder. Yeah, named for Herman Broder. Tell me who is Sylvie, your main character and kind of what influences her Sylvie is a very very obstinate person . She's extremely emotional and passionate , which her grandparents are and she's very close to her grandparents . And when her grandparents die when she's a teenager , she essentially goes into a form of free fall that it seems as if her high school boyfriend , later husband, Jonah, is saving her from . But in fact, he's part of it. And when she comes out of that , she becomes convinced that she can't trust love . She can only trust sex and desire to a limited degree . She then decides, okay, I will construct an entire philosophy that will make it safe for me to be in love with a man that will make sure that what happened to me once can't happen to me again . What is Sylvie's theory about the end of romance? So Sylvie believes that the conventions of romance, the conventions of heterosexual partnership, especially the conventions of marri age so constricting for women that as soon as those conventions begin to affect a relationship, the relationship either is doomed or is doomed to harm the woman . And there is truth to that, certainly , but Sylvie believes it to an extreme degree . So she thinks, okay, if I can have a relationship . If I can be with this man I've accidentally fallen in love with who is supposed to be a hookup . But if nobody knows not our friends, not our colleagues, maybe not even our families , then their expectations can't affect us and we can be our genuine selves. Do you think Sylvie's onto something I think that Sylvie is identifying problems certainly , but I think that her solution is unworkable and the book demonstrates that it's not a spoiler to say. I mean , another aspect of Sylvie's belief system, which is not quite the end of romance, but which is very important to her and to the book , is that she is very, very , very averse to the idea of victimhood. She very strongly does not want to identify as a victim herself . And on that front, I think that she is onto something in that the public identity of victimhood can be forced onto women in a way that is sometimes reductive, can put pressure on women to or see ourselves as fragile or feel as we have to act virtuous . Sylvie has a lot of problems with that and I think that she's bright too , but she also lashes out at herself and at other women who have been harmed because she's so frightened of the cultural role of the victim . You know, she's hurting herself actually and hurting men she loves with these ideas because they're so extreme. Her theories themselves are they're not human almost. In the book, there is this tension between this intellectual idea of life and then what's actually happening in real life . And you know, you kind of see that in Sylvie, like she has these kind of like really strong ideas of right and wrong or like the rigidity of the philosophy dictating what is going to happen in say romance or in a relationship and then that's like butting up against what is actually happening and what he's actually experiencing. How did you navigate that back and forth and kind of like play on that in the book . I found it very fun. I mean, a famous foundational problem in philosophy is the mind body problem. Are we our minds or are we our bodies ? And I was trying to have Sylv ie act out that problem to some degree. But there's actually a great novel by Rebecca Goldstein called The Mind Body Problem that does the same thing. And I didn't want to, you know, I was already stealing Singer's novel . I didn't want to steal that one too, there's a limit. So I began thinking , yeah, but it's not just that we are our minds or our bodies . Our emotions are in fact metaphorically at least another thing. And Sylvia is so busy in this debate between her mind which wants philosophy and safety and privacy and her body which wants sex and connection , that she really neglects to consider her emotional life at all. And so what began as a tug of war became a triangular strugg le . Yeah, between the mind, the body, and then the emotional bridge that connects those two. Yes, which is a whole a whole other thing with its own agenda. I mean, Sylvie experiences her body, especially as something with an agenda. And it's been interesting as the book has been out . Sylvie is very comfortable having sex, she enjoys it, even in high school, it just comes naturally to her . And a certain number of people of readers have questioned the veracity of that part of her character or someone asked me recently if it was wishful thinking , but I would like to live in a world where nobody sees that as wishful thinking. You know, I would like to live in a world where no one questions that aspect of a female character . I mean I'm very influenced by Philip Roth and his male characters are all extremely in touch with their bodies . Most of the characters in the book are American Jews and they all have kind of different relationships with that identity . And I was curious like what was behind that decision ? I'm really glad you asked because it's an important decision to me and to the book. It's a decision that I made because first of all, I identify very strongly as an American Jewish writer. My biggest influences Roth, Singer, Lori Colwin, Grace Paley , are all Jewish and write about different ways of being Jewish in America . And I want to participate in that lineage. It's very meaningful to me . But also it's very rare , actually, to find a novel or at least a literary novel by an American Jew where two Jewish characters have a happy or a stable or really meaningful or a sexy relationship . That's actually surprisingly uncommon, I think . And so I wanted to write some of that. I wanted to write romances between Jews. And I also I'm a writer. I want variety. I want my characters to be varied and I'm really interested in writing about aspects of American Jewishness that I haven't seen that often in fiction or in movies and on TV . Do you think that there's a sense that if you intellectualize something that it can protect you from actually feeling and living, letting your emotions help you make decisions . I think Sylvie wants that to be true more than almost anything else . And much of my process of writing the novel was giving her that desire , building it into something meaningful to her and I hope in a way also meaningful to the reader , while being very clear with myself and I do think with the reader that this is not going to work. Intellectualizing everything is not the way to happiness to fulfillment, to what Sylvie would call liberation. I just don't believe that that's true. Yeah . Lily Meyer is the author of the novel The End of Romance. Lily thanks so, much for chatting with me. Thank you so much again for having me. This was a delight. That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter at nprot. org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Alyssa Adorney. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and Ivy Buck and edited by Meghan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Adriana Guillardo, Julie Deppenbrock, Justine Kennen, Amiko Tomagawa, Todd Munt, Mark Navin, Martin Patience, Melissa Gray, Ashley Brown, Karen Zamora, Gerjit Korr, Sarah Handel and Julia Cochrane. Thank you so much for listening