Lovebug

by Daisy Lafarge

The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.

Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.

Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Poetry, Horror, Science, Philosophy, Summer

134 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 5, 2023

About the author

Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow, UK. Born in Hastings, she has lived in Scotland since 2011.

She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021; Riverhead 2022), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year.

Her reviews and essays on ecology, art and literature have been widely published, appearing in Granta, LitHub, Wellcome Collection Stories, Art Review, TANK Magazine, The White Review, and elsewhere.

In 2021 she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow; her thesis focussed on intimacy and infection. The resulting book, Lovebug, will be published in 2023.

Daisy is currently working on her second novel.

Reviews

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second parasite book of the year.

[Katherine Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! I was pleasantly surprised by this book; which I bought after seeing someone reading it on the train. I love Lafarge's poetic style in which she seamlessly brings together science, literature and psychology in the most accessible way. I am in awe of the way she uses psychoanalytical studies such as Freud, philosophy of Aristotle and literature works such as 'The Flea' by John Dunne to back up scientific facts about microbial life therefore demonstrating the all-consuming nature of humans' symbiotic (and sometimes non-symbiotic) relationship with microbes.

Although the book is called 'lovebug' and the blurb suggests Lafarge explores the relationship between the microbial world and love, I think this is misleading. To me, the book is an exploration of the meaning of life in a literal sense using non-literal techniques such as metaphor and poetry as an analytical tool. Lafarge uses microbial life as a vehicle to explore the themes of love, of course, but also disease, relationships, 'living' and human vulnerability. Her writing is beautiful and she links her points expertly, allowing the reader to view science and life through many different lenses and perspectives. This book really is like no other!

[Andreea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reminded me of how much humans are slaves of their own language and way of thinking. This book is another invitation to look at other beings with more than just "human chauvinism" - we do the same thing when assuming that aliens look like us and have a similar perception of time and space and the same morals.
Perhaps the "smaller" life that is all around us and inside of us deserves more than just being compared to us.

[Kate Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

First book of my 24'...
This was a spectacular, informative and intelligent read for me. Fueled by constant comparison and intrigue this left me associating my own life to all concepts presented in this book. Brilliant to trigger the mind to think of things in a very, very different way.
Grateful to have been able to read this. Thankful for the comparisons and quotes gained from it also. As well as the new words for the vocabulary.

xoxo mwah

[Dan Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Won’t let me do 3.5 stars so I’m rounding up. Really interesting ideas and style but ran out of steam and got a bit repetitive and bogged down in describing other books that had similarities rather than coming up with new thoughts. Love the idea of rewilding the imagination though.

[Katie Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lafarge offers a mixture of autobiographic and academic musing on infection and parasites: a more challenging read than the leisure of her first novel, Paul.

[kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75

my second parasite book in a month sooooo had some unfair competition but we the parasites has come out ahead for me lol

very interesting ideas and it actually made me brainstorm and get excited for my masters thesis which is saying A LOT lmao (the cannibalism parts were Excellent)

didn’t hit as hard as i thought it would but also if you give a bugphobic germaphobic girl a book about bugs and germs ……

[Lauren Castle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, this was a lot of science for me but the parts I understood were intriguing.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO GOOD

[Daze Woolley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I've read this year, maybe ever. This book feels like it was written for me, like Lafarge extracted half formed thoughts in my brain and articulated them with more clarity and context than I ever could

[maryyy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an interesting read, to the point where I don’t think my review will do this book justice. Lafarge covers SO much in 144 pages, from how human beings view diseases, illnesses, so on and so forth. That includes the language in which we communicate sickness and love.

[Michaela Y-M · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My parasitic methods of research - a failure to comply with the boundaries of knowledge and its appeal to objectivity - seemed to echo the microorganism I was studying. Pathogens do not treat the body as a closed text: they are a painful reminder of our openness to the world and each other…"

This book is densely packed, a deliciously claustrophobic read on love, illness, pathogens, science, art, literature, and everything in between. I will definitely return to Lafarge's musings.

[Beth]

this would send a germaphobe into psychosis lol!

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

evocative and unnerving!! I’m more fascinated with love than bugs so felt like I sped through some bits but I have taken so many pictures of many quotes from this. daisy lafarge is an expert honestly

[Nicolas Spiesshofer · Rating 4 out of 5]

strange but kinda love it

[Kyra muramoto · Rating 2 out of 5]

it kept getting me and losing me and at one point it had this graphic description of beastiality that I still can’t get behind? But I think the concept is so interesting and like I love so many of the references but also like I feel like the thoughts and the works it was citing weren’t always strung together in a way that I connected with or found easy to read

[Nata Nova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange, which I liked at the beginning. But it was harder to read at the end. (As I was expecting to read more about biology behind love, not parasites) Overall I enjoyed the comparisons of love and disease. Might give it another go.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow ! didn’t want to put it down. so many references and information, will take multiple reads to digest. a contemplation on bacteria and it’s relations to how we define love, lust and relationships

[Alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

i’m either not a good enough linguist or not a pretentious enough person to understand what i just read

[Anaïs · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant little freak of a book

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I tried to be good, but I never achieved the expertise I thought would finally validate me to write about infectious life, the uneasy bonds that tie all living things together.” Daisy Lafarge, writer of poetry collection Life Without Air and novel Paul, weaves together metaphor, analysis and biography in her extended essay, Lovebug. Love and disease are constantly informing each other, and Lafarge is interested in rethinking the way we talk about them, especially disease, too often the victim of both the warring metaphor and critiques of the warring metaphor (à la Sontag). From abjection to ideas of disease as a corrective (in the vein of Malthus, but also more moderate takes), from harrowing accounts of snail parasites to a sharp exegesis of artworks (like the film Upstream Color, or Donne’s poem ‘The Flea’), Lafarge crafts a distinct text — one which allows its reader to reevaluate not only what disease is (and does and means) but what narrative is (and does and means), too. Original, engaging, inventive, and ridiculously inventive as it connects all its disparate strands coherently and clearly without avoiding its intellectual task. As a poet Lafarge is especially suited to make this account as vivid and striking as possible, fitting as it insists on the complicated beauty lurking in the ugliness of sickness. “It had always been possible to contract a virus from a kiss, but now we knew exactly how it worked. This was all nature and I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t, but also — didn’t want to, since I was still at the mercy of a lapsed evangelical attraction to conceptual underdogs, of a desire to gaze with fearful love on Job’s infected wounds.”

[stella ₊˚⊹♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh wow I have a lot of thoughts on this. lovebug is a very intelligent and well-researched book that traces, activates, questions, circles concepts of love, infection, inflection, abjection, bugs, worms, heaven and hell and diffuses between science, history, literature and autobiographic elements. it all blends together into this amazing piece that made me learn and want to continue learning- and so much more texts for my to-read list. I love the way that it questions our ways of perceiving matters like illness, infection, viruses, bacteria, gives new perspectives, leads us aways from our habit of always tracing back to the origin of things. it grips our use of language when talking about illness and infection directly by the throat and unravels (maybe even just a small part) of the stunning variation of our body and what the 'self' and our perception of it might mean

[effie allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think i would get more out of a second read. but i particularly enjoyed the last half. a lovely mash up of a bunch of theory along with occasional personal narrative-- i liked that the book stayed in first person, it felt like an exploration. picked this up because i have also been thinking lately about the multitudes within us. i do wish she had spent a bit more time marinating with the complex ideas she brings up in this book. the connections she made were smart, fast, close, spiritual even, but i wish she dug in deeper. would read other things she wrote though, interesting thinker

[Mari Alstad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Det har tatt meg aaaaltfor lang tid å lese denne, im ashamed. Neida men jeg fikk denne i gave av min litteraturviter venn og jeg tror det er ekstra gøy å lese den når man vet sin litteraturteori and such - LIKEVEL, veldig elegant og antakelig en bok jeg kommer til å plukke opp og bla gjennom igjen. Ekkel og nydelig lesning om hverandre, akkurat det det burde være med en slik tematikk. Love is a parasite, infectious diseases are everywhere

[elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF: I hate to DNF a book. The writing was interesting and I have dabbled in weird or unconventional topics. That being said, throwing in a random excerpt about beastiality is disgusting, especially when the point about oedipus animals had been made without such a triggering and unexpected plot point.

[Karina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is poetry – even if Daisy Lafarge didn't mean it to be. This book is a lot of things and does a lot of things, but above all I was carried through it by her very personal and poetic voice. I adore reading works by people who are obsessed (or: absolutely infected) by certain topics.

I'll write a proper review once I've reread parts of this

[Barbara Suim · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review won't do this freaky book justice. It was awesome and strange, Deleuzian, contrarian in the best way. There are not many books that I consider as intelligent and as entertaining of a read. This text oscillates symbolisms such as the bite and the head, with some literary criticism that seamlessly interprets biology, pathology and geology.

[Cara Tapster · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this book since I don’t know much about microbiology (and have never been particularly interested in it). However, I am a sucker for an extended metaphor for love. Add flowing poetic prose into the mix and I’m all in. I have never read a book like this before. It was fascinating, thought provoking and just plain weird at some parts. I loved it.

[lidia · Rating 4 out of 5]

while I was in the two last chapters of this book, I was facing the texts, gracing the pages, with fingers that depicted its contents. a love I hope doesn't mimic that of the snail contained within Lafarge's exquisite scientific prose -that I, in the same situation as her, couldn't have found a better home than that in her view of the fields-. the thing is, I hope I don't dance to the beat.

[Horyaah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be one of my favorite books of the year and only fueled my love for all things consuming and moldy.

I think I annotated it more than my actual readings.

I understand the criticisms of people saying it's too poetic and I understand.... however I like it :D

I will definitely be reading this again and again. I wish I remembered more of my review but oh well.