Which brings us to the related concept of keeping secrets. Secrets, Kipnis notes, are harder to maintain (on both sides) when you’re trapped in a cramped enclosure. She describes the uncanny allure of rummaging through your partner’s belongings in search of the “hidden caches” of surprising porn, unpaid bills, emails to exes — stashes that would have gone undiscovered had it not been for a sudden excess of closeness. . She writes about the cheerful “Eureka!” from finding evidence of a partner’s hidden life, the shame of seeking it in the first place, and the inevitable synthesis of the two feelings: acknowledgment of mutual depravity.
The book is also a post-mortem relationship. At one point during the pandemic, Kipnis confronts her partner about his alcohol use: “For him, alcohol was a magical elixir that arouses, amplifies and erases emotions all at once.” He presents the defense that everyone has a life-avoiding mechanism of choice, and that his just happens to be alcohol. Kipnis accepts this reasoning in an abstract way, but finds it lame in practice – for example, when her partner is ticketed for drinking in public for failing to hide his can in a bag, as any prudent open-air drinker knows.
She becomes aware of ‘rather untapped reservoirs of sadism’ bubbling up inside. Her boyfriend hates being patted on the head because it makes him feel like a dog; Kipnis diabolically starts doing just this when they watch TV. The tapping of the head is her equivalent of violently scratching a mosquito bite: nothing good comes of it, yet she claws away, leading to even more discomfort and the cycle continues. During a fight, she throws a can of Diet Coke at the boyfriend, “exciting like Roger Clemens”, only to find sticky liquid flowing down her own back because the can was open.
“I’m a critic: I want to see the world clearly,” Kipnis writes, adding: “Maybe that’s an exaggeration — I just want to have interesting things to say about the world.” And she does! For three of the book’s four essays, poking around Kipnis’ mind feels like eating the world’s best trail mix: no blind raisins to push aside, just M&Ms and the pricier nuts.
All the missing raisins are found in the fourth essay, which is a tour of the socially mediated romantic life of one of Kipnis’s former students, Zelda. The essay is annoying, or maybe Zelda is annoying. Or maybe read about from someone socially mediated romantic life is boring. It’s all commotion and no action. Instead of sex, there’s Instagram, Twitter, FaceTime, screenshots, DMs. Apparently, if you’re texting someone and your text is normally blue but now green, it means you may have been blocked. If it turns blue again, the block may have been unblocked. This reminded me of a line from Goethe’s “Elective Affinities”, which I’ll paraphrase slightly here: “Even in momentous times, when everything is at stake, people who spend way too much time online go about their daily lives as if nothing is happening.”