Living together is always an experiment. The coexistence between those once in love always moves through different phases of an unpredictable cycle.
Getting to see the couple as a stranger is not something so strange (worth the braying). The best of the initial self in love puts aside its defects, perhaps even its vices and offers the best of itself. The effervescence of the physical lasts for a time. Everything conspires so that reality is transformed, for better or for worse, but never maintaining its original sensation.
The transformation of love, its magical or tragic mutation (depending on how you look at it) is an emotional process that escapes any previous science or estimation.
And from there this book begins, it is about doing science of love, empiricism. Reach the knowledge of the last frontier beyond love.
Mary, a woman at a personal crossroads, decides to access a unique job under the enigmatic umbrella of "Girlfriend Experiment." Mary takes on her role as an emotional girlfriend, compensated by other women assigned complementary roles.
The other side of the relationship is Kurt, an all-around actor looking for answers to his own failures. Mary and Kurt hit it off, perhaps both sheltered in their latency of love in any manifestation. Until it ends up manifesting itself between them.
Mary and the other girls, like Kurt, may be close to glimpses into the ins and outs of love, its most traumatic transitions and losses.
And they will discover nuances of love that appear in the novel immersed in contradictory sensations of the very nature of the experiment, turned into a hyperrealistic or dreamlike experience.
Answers to the matter? Perhaps not as many as we expected or perhaps all for the reader capable of reading between the lines, capable of deciphering symbols and empathizing, of mimicking the processes experienced by Mary or Kurt.
The feminist perspective on the matter is also a noteworthy nuance. Is love experienced differently in men and women due to external conditions?
The knowledge of the other and of oneself at the moment of falling in love may be the key. Discovering who we are at the beginning of a flirtation will not prevent the fleetingness of passion, but it may prevent false dreams or foolish hopes.
And humor, we also find the humor of our emotional miseries as beings exposed to emotional swings.
A complete novel about love approached far beyond the romantic genre to reach an existential point. Because really existing without love is completely unfeasible.
You can now buy the novel The answers, Catherine Lacey's new book, here: