This will be a small and chaotic ramekin of pudding, just to let you know I haven’t forgotten you, I would never. Hello. I’ve had a busy August full of beautiful times, occasionally threaded through with a skein of melancholy. I got weirdly sick, got better, visited a friend’s farm near Virginia, relieved the one year anniversary of the Brighton beach trip I chronicled in my 2022 Grub Street diet and did not throw up borscht on the Q tracks this time. I hugged various sweeties at my paperback tour events, wrote some, read some, went dancing. I’ve been neglecting my garden plot, which has retained a wild and sullen prettiness. Even so, I’ve harvested from it: sugar-sweet cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, marigolds, a capsaicin-suffused serrano, a plucky sheaf of collard and mustard greens. My friend J gave me a recipe for the collards that was so good I’m still thinking about it: you ribbon the raw leaves and massage them with sesame oil and honey and acid and tamari and minced shallot. I’m teaching fiction at Pratt this fall, I’m swimming more, I’m drinking less.
Last night I stayed up half the night reading Idlewild, the very-soon forthcoming debut novel from my friend James Frankie Thomas. I was drawn so fully and skillfully under its spell that I stayed up until four in the morning reading. Idlewild is incredible. It’s the story of the doomed love of platonic-but-its-real-complicated best friends Fay and Nell, whose Manhattan-Quaker-school-set friendship begins on the first day of 9/11 and flourishes into something life-changing as they grow obsessed with Theo and Christopher, two gay boys, also their classmates. References to fanfic, Bushisms, theater kid hijinks, dial-up, and AIM fill the novel, which also gives us one of the more memorable contemporary trans characters I’ve read. I’m not in the business of pronouncing anything Thee Great ______ Novel, but Idlewild, if there’s any fairness in this duniya, will be remembered as a Great Gay Novel of our times, fizzy and clever, wise and sweet, and (truly) funny. It swings for the fences, it delights, it delivers on its own tender, slash-y, lightly operatic promises.
If you live in NY, come see me and James launch Idlewild at Greenlight Books on, well, 9/11. And wherever you live, preorder his book this week.
Oh, and! If you have some extra coin, please send it to my friend Jasmine to help with her ongoing cancer treatment. If you wanted a copy of All This Could Be Different but couldn’t easily afford it, I’m giving away some. Write to me here.
One of the things that Thomas gets really right in Idlewild is limerence, which I’ve been thinking about as a youthful main character in my own work-in-progress navigates it. Limerence is one of those words I inferred from context to simply mean really big and deep crush, but in actuality it refers to something more specific: an obliterative, obsessive longing for a person—the limerence object, or LO, in the parlance of the Reddit forums and TikTok swarms devoted to this topic.
Limerence is a longing, an infatuation, that causes a flatlining of the self. That tethers the self, in debilitating ways to another person. This, though, without granting that person understanding, care, autonomy, what we might call humanness. To be limerent exists somewhere adjacent to OCD or addiction. Limerence, the experts who theorize it stress, is different than love.
Or at least, one school of thought, psychoanalysis, claims.
In the last few years, I watched one of my friends go through an obsession with a man that, in my eyes, began to look like textbook limerence. It appeared to cause her agony. I thought about bringing up the concept, but, despite a fondness for a loving directness in friendship, didn’t. Perhaps this is because I, privately, am a romantic, and there is nothing so puncturing of romance as sending some WebMD-ass article about a pop-psych topic. Perhaps there was something I found discomfiting in my own impulse to taxonomize, and perhaps, subconsciously, to pathologize, her deep feeling.
But to be in deep limerence, for so many, is distressing. It’s being down bad, so down bad, that you end up in the DSM-V. Ergo, there are thousands of people talking about limerence psychology on TikTok—holding forth, warning each other, renarrativizing events of their lives using this psychological frame.
“Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in,” said the analyst Robert Seidenberg, as quoted by the psychologist and philosopher Dorothy Tennov, who coined the term “limerence” in the 1960s when embarking on a rigorous, qualitative study of lovesickness. For Tennov, limerence “is not the product of human decision: It is something that happens to us. Its intrusive cognitive components, the obsessional quality that may feel voluntary at the moment but that defies control, seem to be the aspect of limerence in which it differs most from other states.”
(Limerence sounds derivative of French but is not. As Tennov noted with satisfaction, “it has no etymology.”)
She’s performing emotional labor. He’s being performative (inevitably used incorrectly). Trauma anniversary. Trauma dumping. Trauma bonding. Accountability process. Mental load. Cisheteropatriarchy. Limerence object (LO). I appreciate that behind the terms themselves is an impulse to name something real, to affix it with precision. To name something is to understand it. To understand it is to create space to change it, at least in theory. Perhaps my aversion to the ways in which forms of theory—from gender studies to psychoanalysis—have helped remake contemporary language is, more often than not, how fluorescent, medicalized, and unbeautiful they have left it. Perhaps a discomfort is rooted elsewhere in addition, is rooted in the assumptive thinking propping up much of the language: that suffering is always to be avoided, that the natural state of mind and body is an optimized wellness, that an accounting ledger should exist within all human relationships, that to lose your self—even in passion—is a terrible thing.
From the ages of seven to fourteen I fixated on one of my classmates. For me there was no other person I felt the stirring of attraction or longing for, absurd as it sounds, all those years. I only told my two best friends.
I never used the word love, until, at thirteen, the new boyfriend of one of my best friends smirked at me in the middle of a group conversation about celebrity crushes and said, eyes full of roguish knowing, “Nothing like that for Sarah. All these years, she’s only been in love with _______.”
“Shut your mouth,” I croaked, pulse thumping, insides withering, at having this secret announced so publicly, at realizing this twerp of a boy knew what mattered most to me, and could only have known thanks to the indiscretion of my friend. Everyone sitting with us tittered. I stood up, genuinely considering punching him out.
“Hey, man, chill,” my friend’s little boyfriend said, “it’s a beautiful thing.” A hush fell over the group. We were sitting on a curb outside our school, baking in the Muscat heat.
It was the sincerity in his face that undid me, that froze me in place and inaction. He’d meant it: it’s a beautiful thing. I saw what he felt for me in that moment: deep pity, emulsified with respect.
Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in.
As a teenager I looked to fiction to hold a mirror to what coiled and struck within me. I read, with a thrill of recognition and revulsion, Heathcliff’s terrifying, deranged, curse in Wuthering Heights. “I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man…It hardly moved my compassion - it appalled me: still, I felt reluctant to quit him so.
I wonder how I’d have fared if I’d had limerence TikTok instead.
x
STM
ugh so good, so much to think about, i'm sharing this w everyone and buying idlewild asap
This deeply resonates with me. I think too often today, we feel the need to constantly fix and contort ourselves - never able to accept who we innately are as humans. The proliferation of therapy speak has made self acceptance even harder. Deeply needed your perspective. Thank you.