22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

A Novel

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Pub Date 07 Jul 2020 | Archive Date 13 Jul 2020

Description

“Daphne Merkin meets the formidable challenge of describing female lust and romantic obsession with all the desired daring, candor, and skill. The result is a bracingly honest, keenly insightful, utterly compelling book.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

A harrowing, compulsively readable novel about breaking free of sexual obsession

A novel of unsurpassed candor, punctuated by bold ruminations on love, marriage, family, sex, gender, and relationships, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love depicts one woman’s psychological descent into sexual captivity. This is the story of the extremes to which she will go to achieve erotic bliss—and of her struggle to regain her soul.

As Daphne Merkin’s audacious new novel opens, a wife and mother looks back at the moment when her life as a young book editor is upended by a casual encounter with an intriguing man who seems to intuit her every thought.

Convinced she’s found the one, Judith Stone succumbs to the push and pull of her sexual entanglement with Howard Rose, constantly seeking his attention and approval. That is, until she realizes that beneath his erotic obsession with her, Howard is intent on obliterating any sense of self she possesses. As Merkin writes, his was “the allure of remoteness, affection edged in ice.” Escaping Howard’s grasp—and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control—will test the limits of Judith’s capacity to resist the siren call of submission.

Narrated by Judith in a time before the #MeToo movement, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love charts the persistent hold the past has on us and the way it shapes our present.

“Daphne Merkin meets the formidable challenge of describing female lust and romantic obsession with all the desired daring, candor, and skill. The result is a bracingly honest, keenly insightful...


Advance Praise

“Daphne Merkin puts into words observations that have mystified me forever. Like Milan Kundera, she knows how to get inside the sexual mind without making the reader cringe. There is no one who writes better.”

—Carly Simon

“Sometimes desire is a catastrophe. You can be a supremely brainy woman and not have the first clue about your predilections, until the wrong man comes along and introduces you to them. Daphne Merkin gives us an exquisitely rendered philosophical mystery about the divided self, and the awkward fact that we don’t necessarily choose what arouses us.”

—Laura Kipnis, author of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

“Daphne Merkin meets the formidable challenge of describing female lust and romantic obsession with all the desired daring, candor, and skill. The result is a bracingly honest, keenly insightful, utterly compelling book.”

—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

“22 Minutes of Unconditional Love is a very strong book, full of echoes and recognitions and interest on many levels—personal, literary, sociological, philosophical. Its take on the freedoms and constraints of feminism is much needed. Daphne Merkin’s prose has some of the shocking exhilaration of early Edna O’Brien.”

—Margaret Drabble, author of The Dark Flood Rises

“Daphne Merkin has written a novel as vexing and bright as a Rubik's cube. 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love is an anti-romance about a woman’s profane and humiliating desire to be defined by love.”

—Catherine Lacey, author of Pew


“Daphne Merkin puts into words observations that have mystified me forever. Like Milan Kundera, she knows how to get inside the sexual mind without making the reader cringe. There is no one who...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780374140380
PRICE $26.00 (USD)
PAGES 256

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