A reverse kind of exposition

I read a book. Read a book—it’s such a simple, obvious thing to do. Pandemic times are perfect book reading times, but I did very little of it over the last year and a half. But this past week I began to read this book in the early evenings.

As I was reading I realized that it was the last book I remember my ex-boyfriend reading. He had the actual trade paperback and the cover was so beautiful. I would see it lying around, impressed by the typography and simple but evocative image on the cover. There it was on the dining room table near the spot he sat at in the morning, on floor on his side of the bed, on pillow on left side of the couch, where he’d stretch out. I remember he told me that he was reading it in part because it was written by a woman—it was a concerted effort to read and learn from a woman’s perspective and one who was writing about this moment. I liked this. I didn’t think of him as being a long-form reader though, and couldn’t even recall if he had ever finished a book in the 11 years we had lived together. I think now that likely it was a woman who told him to read the book and he was repeating what she had said to him. And he gave weight to her recommendation and perhaps her as a person enough to actually purchase the book. Or maybe it was gifted. Or who knows. I also don’t know if he finished it—I don’t recall seeing him read it very much, but it did move around the loft.

As I was reading the e-book version, I found myself increasingly aware that he had been reading it too and I began to think about passages of the book as I imagined he may have thought about them. It was distracting.

The book is beautiful and spare with lucid little nuggets of personal insights of relationships. It’s smart and deep thinking, a bit cruel in moments. I gasped at this passage: