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A Dialogue on Love
When she begins therapy for depression after breast cancer treatment, the author brings with her an extraordinarily open and critical mind, but also shyness about revealing herself. Resisting easy responses to issues of dependence, desire, and mortality, she warily commits to a male therapist who shares little of her cultural and intellectual world.
Although not without pain, their improvised relationship is as unexpectedly pleasurable as her writing is unconventional: Sedgwick combines dialogue, verse, and even her therapist's notes to explore her interior life--and delivers a delicate and tender account of how we arrive at love.
Although not without pain, their improvised relationship is as unexpectedly pleasurable as her writing is unconventional: Sedgwick combines dialogue, verse, and even her therapist's notes to explore her interior life--and delivers a delicate and tender account of how we arrive at love.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
24 people are currently reading
1585 people want to read
About the author
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
33 books300 followersEve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academician specializing in literary criticism and feminist analysis; she is known as one of the architects of queer theory. Her works reflect an interest in queer performativity, experimental critical writing, non-Lacanian psychoanalysis, Buddhism and pedagogy, the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, and material culture, especially textiles and texture. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick uncovered purportedly hidden homoerotic subplots in writers like Charles Dickens, Henry James and Marcel Proust. Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete or damaged if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, coining the terms "antihomophobic" and "homosocial."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
February 17, 2010
Though I've read the 'Introduction: Axiomatic' from Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet a number of times, this book was my first big dose of her--and frankly, I'm glad I began here. Not to say that's she's not a fabulous theorist, but that I just don't know enough and I think it will be rather nice to move into that sphere of her work having had the opportunity to 'get to know' her through this little text. A real loss to queer studies (and, it seems after reading this, the world) when Sedgwick passed last year. I was fortunate enough to have attended the conference in her honor at Boston University in the fall, which sparked my interest in grabbing A Dialogue on Love up.
Let's get a couple of things clear. This is not a wildly theoretical text. This is not a daunting read. It doesn't purport to 'explain' love in any comprehensive sense. But it is a tender, beautiful glimpse into one woman's life--a woman still struggling with recent breast cancer, a woman suffering possible depression, a woman coming to terms with her family history, her sexuality, her aversion to analysts, and (naturally) quite a bit more. It's set as a sort of 'dialogue' between her and Shannon, her analyst. The transition between the 'voices' can be disconcerting at times, but is usually pretty fascinating to watch-particularly to see where Sedgwick decides to illuminate a scene or an issue from Shannon's vantage point (via his notes) rather than her own. It can be a method of concealment--or can perhaps suggest that he's more the 'expert' on her experience than she herself was. But the lines between patient and 'expert' increasingly break down over the course of this, with Eve visiting Shannon in the hospital for his own life-threatening illness near the end of their journey.
This is more a memoir than anything, though she blurs the boundaries of genre in a number of ways--by the presentation of the 'opposing' voices of patient and analyst, the use of memory and supposed 'real time' experience (which is of course also recollected), and perhaps most jarringly, the use of haiku interspersed as part of the 'normal' writing. She breaks into and out of it seemingly at random, though if you look closer, the breaks often make sense, in terms of picking out particularly salient observations or moments of beauty (that perhaps you'd otherwise breeze over). It's a sensitive portrait of a brief period in Eve Segdwick's life, and is a really wonderful read. 4 rather than 5 stars, because I'm trying to be more stingy with my 5-stars these days; I think I was a big softie when I joined goodreads. Though maybe when I come back to this book sometime, I'll rethink my rating, 'cuz this often (also) turned me into a big ol' softie.
Let's get a couple of things clear. This is not a wildly theoretical text. This is not a daunting read. It doesn't purport to 'explain' love in any comprehensive sense. But it is a tender, beautiful glimpse into one woman's life--a woman still struggling with recent breast cancer, a woman suffering possible depression, a woman coming to terms with her family history, her sexuality, her aversion to analysts, and (naturally) quite a bit more. It's set as a sort of 'dialogue' between her and Shannon, her analyst. The transition between the 'voices' can be disconcerting at times, but is usually pretty fascinating to watch-particularly to see where Sedgwick decides to illuminate a scene or an issue from Shannon's vantage point (via his notes) rather than her own. It can be a method of concealment--or can perhaps suggest that he's more the 'expert' on her experience than she herself was. But the lines between patient and 'expert' increasingly break down over the course of this, with Eve visiting Shannon in the hospital for his own life-threatening illness near the end of their journey.
This is more a memoir than anything, though she blurs the boundaries of genre in a number of ways--by the presentation of the 'opposing' voices of patient and analyst, the use of memory and supposed 'real time' experience (which is of course also recollected), and perhaps most jarringly, the use of haiku interspersed as part of the 'normal' writing. She breaks into and out of it seemingly at random, though if you look closer, the breaks often make sense, in terms of picking out particularly salient observations or moments of beauty (that perhaps you'd otherwise breeze over). It's a sensitive portrait of a brief period in Eve Segdwick's life, and is a really wonderful read. 4 rather than 5 stars, because I'm trying to be more stingy with my 5-stars these days; I think I was a big softie when I joined goodreads. Though maybe when I come back to this book sometime, I'll rethink my rating, 'cuz this often (also) turned me into a big ol' softie.
January 18, 2022
Hmmm found my way through this book even though I didn't think I would. It's so heady! But it's an interesting head to be in. Definitely made me think about my own therapy sessions differently...and about interpersonal dynamics and communication. But emerging soooo over Sedgwick's preoccupation with psychoanalysis and Freudian thought. I find that the things an academic/intellectual is concerned with in a therapy session is really different than what I am attuned to. But I was very struck by her prose and how the text slowly unfurled!! Very cool and collaborative that she was able to get her therapist's notes from the session.... I'd say read this if you are ready and the pages keep turning even if you didn't think they would!
January 26, 2021
good but a weird bit where she tries to leave her cat to die :////
November 23, 2016
I was introduced to the legacy of EKS years after she passed. This is a temporal arrangement I think about frequently enough that it's become a piece of furniture in my cognitive space that, when it's time for theory to bear an affective load of sadness and mourning, I sit in. I don't feel bad about deifying her in this way--it seems plenty of others have beat me to it: she's the patron saint of all things warm and taken. She's an eminently personal scholar. I don't feel alone in boasting an intimate parasocial relationship with the idea of her. Not quite a celebrity, but someone that seems easy to care for and be cared by. Easy to imagine as our mother and child in another life (p.216), right?
I have an admittedly fraught relationship with confessional writing (self indulgent? yes. consumptive? yes. are these bad things? ???) but, oh, I'm not sure. A Dialogue on Love dodges these nested concerns, why? Does its dialogic format gleam honesty of its mutual construction of me, of it not merely being consumptive but reconstructive? Or is it because it takes therapy, a confessional practice, and turns it into an archival practice, an analytic project, collaborative and multivocal? I don't know. Maybe it's only the living's confessions that distress me. To know you are dying qualitatively changes the nature of confession: frankly, you won't have to live with yourself once inside out--but all of us who continually imagine her stolen warmth get to.
Thanks for the good company, Eve and Shannon.
I have an admittedly fraught relationship with confessional writing (self indulgent? yes. consumptive? yes. are these bad things? ???) but, oh, I'm not sure. A Dialogue on Love dodges these nested concerns, why? Does its dialogic format gleam honesty of its mutual construction of me, of it not merely being consumptive but reconstructive? Or is it because it takes therapy, a confessional practice, and turns it into an archival practice, an analytic project, collaborative and multivocal? I don't know. Maybe it's only the living's confessions that distress me. To know you are dying qualitatively changes the nature of confession: frankly, you won't have to live with yourself once inside out--but all of us who continually imagine her stolen warmth get to.
Thanks for the good company, Eve and Shannon.
May 28, 2015
An unexpected pleasure.
March 24, 2019
I just love her. I think Eve helped us.
April 11, 2019
u kno, really just helped me process the fact that i briefly fell in luuuv with my therapist - - thank u eve sedgwick.
February 17, 2024
3.5 stars. I'm primarily active on Storygraph (as circlepines), please join me there!
CW: mentions of cancer, depression, suicidal ideation, sexuality/kink, and psychotherapy
The cheap reduction of this book is "a woman with breast cancer writes a memoir about her connection with her therapist." Someone who picks this up expecting an emotionally straightforward narrative along those lines will probably find this intolerably navel-gazey. Better reasons to pick up this book (in no particular order) would be:
a) An intrinsic interest in the life and work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
b) An interest in intimate, voyeuristic dissection of the therapist-client relationship
c) A desire to receive vicarious psychotherapy around some of the issues that EKS explores in her therapy -- which, for the most part, are less around her cancer diagnosis and more about living with chronic depression and suicidal ideation; the experience of growing up gifted in a family that does not recognize your fundamental child-like needs because of your adult-like intellect; disentangling the dysfunctional patterns of emotional expression that you learned from your parents; and integrating sexuality (particularly kink and fantasy) with your greater sense of self.
Probably the most thematically similar book I've read is Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, in its intense focus on dynamics of psychotherapy. In both books, there are moments when the authors struggle to differentiate what was personally meaningful to them in their therapy, and what may be interesting to a broader audience. What save A Dialogue on Love from becoming too self-obsessed are the interwoven excerpts from her therapist's session notes. Although this provides a second voice, it doesn't quite create a "dialogue" -- more like two parallel perspectives that sometimes run closely together, sometimes diverge, but never quite touch. It is fascinating to read how EKS and Shannon (her therapist) narrate particularly challenging sessions through their own frames.
At the same time, Shannon's notes were clearly written on the fly for personal reference and are largely unedited, so they don't always present a coherent narrative. This becomes more of an issue later in the book, when EKS stops journaling about her therapy in the same level of detail, and there are pages at a time that are entirely in Shannon's voice -- e.g.:
It's harder to find a sense of cohesive meaning here. Oddly, these excerpts of Shannon's notes are the places where the book feels the most self-preoccupied -- since they were clearly selected for their resonance for EKS, rather than their comprehensibility to the reader.
EKS's portions of the narrative are written in haibun, a Japanese form that combines prose with haiku. I wasn't familiar with this form and initially found the choice of haiku to be a little cloying -- redeemed by the fact that they so effortlessly and elegantly integrate with the prose. EKS explicitly discusses the choice of form toward the end of the book, noting that it's classically used for travel narratives (so the metaphor here is obvious) and that although haiku can be "precious, insipid," she was inspired by a James Merrill piece about his travel in Japan:
She does achieve the same effect quite skillfully here.
CW: mentions of cancer, depression, suicidal ideation, sexuality/kink, and psychotherapy
The cheap reduction of this book is "a woman with breast cancer writes a memoir about her connection with her therapist." Someone who picks this up expecting an emotionally straightforward narrative along those lines will probably find this intolerably navel-gazey. Better reasons to pick up this book (in no particular order) would be:
a) An intrinsic interest in the life and work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
b) An interest in intimate, voyeuristic dissection of the therapist-client relationship
c) A desire to receive vicarious psychotherapy around some of the issues that EKS explores in her therapy -- which, for the most part, are less around her cancer diagnosis and more about living with chronic depression and suicidal ideation; the experience of growing up gifted in a family that does not recognize your fundamental child-like needs because of your adult-like intellect; disentangling the dysfunctional patterns of emotional expression that you learned from your parents; and integrating sexuality (particularly kink and fantasy) with your greater sense of self.
Probably the most thematically similar book I've read is Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, in its intense focus on dynamics of psychotherapy. In both books, there are moments when the authors struggle to differentiate what was personally meaningful to them in their therapy, and what may be interesting to a broader audience. What save A Dialogue on Love from becoming too self-obsessed are the interwoven excerpts from her therapist's session notes. Although this provides a second voice, it doesn't quite create a "dialogue" -- more like two parallel perspectives that sometimes run closely together, sometimes diverge, but never quite touch. It is fascinating to read how EKS and Shannon (her therapist) narrate particularly challenging sessions through their own frames.
At the same time, Shannon's notes were clearly written on the fly for personal reference and are largely unedited, so they don't always present a coherent narrative. This becomes more of an issue later in the book, when EKS stops journaling about her therapy in the same level of detail, and there are pages at a time that are entirely in Shannon's voice -- e.g.:
Short skirts -- tickling -- sexual sensations -- violence -- Ouija board (focus dissipates) What do you think? (Suggest she stay with the sexual feelings and thoughts) Sensations -- Tyler talking about locker rooms as a kid, the fantasy of a line of boys being spanked by gym coach -- warm space of attention and love -- notes constriction in chest, losing touch with lower body -- hard to think/talk about. (p. 201)
It's harder to find a sense of cohesive meaning here. Oddly, these excerpts of Shannon's notes are the places where the book feels the most self-preoccupied -- since they were clearly selected for their resonance for EKS, rather than their comprehensibility to the reader.
EKS's portions of the narrative are written in haibun, a Japanese form that combines prose with haiku. I wasn't familiar with this form and initially found the choice of haiku to be a little cloying -- redeemed by the fact that they so effortlessly and elegantly integrate with the prose. EKS explicitly discusses the choice of form toward the end of the book, noting that it's classically used for travel narratives (so the metaphor here is obvious) and that although haiku can be "precious, insipid," she was inspired by a James Merrill piece about his travel in Japan:
Spangled with haiku is more what it feels like, his very sentences fraying
into implosions
of starlike density or
radiance, then out
into a prose that's never quite not the poetry -- (p. 194)
She does achieve the same effect quite skillfully here.
May 23, 2025
A book club pick with tricky premise: to expose/reveal the reparative process of therapy. This book is deceptively simple in its curation of diary entries, therapist notes and poems to map this healing process. Sedgwick (a pretty-famous queer theorist) has complicated and expansive feelings about sex and pleasure that surpass the usual boredom I feel when someone describes their dream. I think everyone in the book club felt a stake in this book, felt the strength of her intelligence and her quite-singular sensitivity to new modes of love and relations.
August 24, 2022
relatable even if you don’t have cancer and never went to therapy…cried and yearned simultaneously
September 30, 2024
ive been waiting for years to read this book — did not expect it to be so strange, jolting, enriching
January 16, 2023
This was the most intimate of reading experiences. Not only because of the generosity of Sedgwick's self-exposure but also thanks to the exquisite sensation of making out one of my best friend's annotations. Does that say 'avoidance'? Why did he say that? What has meant he underlined this? Oh... and there's my name! The end of the book had me muttering 'i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)' to myself again and again, and adding to it: '(and you too carry mine).' Somehow, though, despite this being what it left me with (cummings being the cliché sentimentalist) and despite also Sedgwick self-describing as overweeningly sentimental, the text avoids any of that clagginess. Extraordinary! Just extraordinary! I can't stop recommending it.
October 6, 2022
Wat is nu het vreemdst? Hoe ‘Shannon’, de therapeut, de ouders van zijn vierenveertigjarige patiënte, Eve Sedgwick, schijnbaar achteloos voor een gesprekje uitnodigt (145), hoe hij immer imaginaire dansjes uitvoert? Of is het vreemder dat zij zelf als deconstructionist, (post)structuralist, marxist en lacaniaan een therapeut kiest van wie ze zegt “how resistant he always seems to focusing on the signifier” (87) en die ze vaak zelfs ronduit dom vindt (51)?
Het minst vreemde is dan dat zij het kaartje waarop hij zijn privé telefoonnummer noteerde, nadat ze het van hem krijgt, in haar broekzak steekt, en vervolgens ‘per ongeluk’ in de wasmachine draait. (145)
Het minst vreemde is dan dat zij het kaartje waarop hij zijn privé telefoonnummer noteerde, nadat ze het van hem krijgt, in haar broekzak steekt, en vervolgens ‘per ongeluk’ in de wasmachine draait. (145)
March 24, 2013
Self-indulgent through most of it, but I did love the last quarter of it, and that made me look on the earlier parts of it with more charity. Loved the form- utterly fascinating.
November 20, 2014
Required reading for the heart.
December 17, 2021
I’ve read some of Sedgwick’s academic work (obviously important and life changing work in her field), and I love how this book shows who Sedgwick was as a person & how her personal life bled into her academic work. My favorite thing about this book is the format: the book is an amalgamation of prose, poetry, and snippets of Sedgwick’s therapist’s notes. Somehow, these three types of writing converge into a single narrative/rumination on morality. Worked really well for me even though I was skeptical at first.
July 8, 2023
Using poems, prose, and her therapist's notes it describes a deep emotional well of going through recovery from cancer, and gave me further clarity about what therapy is and why it is used. What was clever is that sometimes I can't tell who was talking Sedgwick or the therapist, other times it is very clear. It's interesting, deeply introspective, and theoretical, but can also be funny at times, emotional serious at others.
March 25, 2025
many many mixed feelings over this autobiography. first of all, completely unnatural and inappropriate relationship with a therapist which did through me off for the better half of the story. i could find myself relating to eve in some areas (which was a concerning revelation) but i admired her vulnerability. unfortunately i just don’t know if i love her personality but like she’s in therapy, working on herself, so who am i to judge?
July 24, 2020
Oh wow, where to start?
Moving, heady, thoughtful, delicate. It’s just incredible to have such an intimate portrait of Eve Sedgwick. Particularly the different ways she perceives love and desire, since these are the topics of her academic work. Some parts dragged, and not everyone will like this style of theory-based memoir. It spoke volumes to me.
Moving, heady, thoughtful, delicate. It’s just incredible to have such an intimate portrait of Eve Sedgwick. Particularly the different ways she perceives love and desire, since these are the topics of her academic work. Some parts dragged, and not everyone will like this style of theory-based memoir. It spoke volumes to me.
May 8, 2017
Kaç puan vermem gerektiği konusunda oldukça muallakta kaldım. 3,5 tan 4 verdim en son. Eğer psikoterapi, psikanaliz, cinsellik, homoseksüellik ve ölüm konuları ilginizi çekmiyorsa sizi çok sıkacak bir kitap. Kitabın yazarı ile Tezer Özlü arasındaki benzerlikler analiz etmeye değer.
September 5, 2022
preparing for something to be forgotten is so much more sweetbitter than preparing for it to be remembered
what does the preparing look like then, as a project on top of the endless, unfinished, exhausting project of caring?
but
'that's enough. you can
stop now.'
what does the preparing look like then, as a project on top of the endless, unfinished, exhausting project of caring?
but
'that's enough. you can
stop now.'
April 18, 2023
Like others, I thought this book was a little on the heavy side. I don't have cancer and don't know anyone who does, so I wasn't able to relate to that part of the book. Some of the sex stuff was weird, but also kind of freaky in a 👀 way. I overall liked it and will be returning to it.
November 1, 2021
Eve really knew something.
January 25, 2024
Crazy Freudian stuff that is impossible to pin down but Eve Sedgwick’s brain is giant & I hope many people read her forever
December 29, 2024
you have to sit down for this one
January 3, 2025
It’s frustrating how Sedgwick misappropriates haibun for her use without actually doing any research about what it or haiku actually are.
June 29, 2025
If you’ve ever been deeply in love with your therapist you should read this book
October 24, 2011
Self professedly, Eve Kosofsky Sedwick has lead a relatively trouble-free life. There is no imposing history of explicit trauma that threatens her undoing, no distinctly painful memory to which she can point. This advantage, however, seems to be her main concern. How is it possible that she “feel[s] so little attachment to a life thats so full of the things that other people long for”? (15) Throughout A Dialogue on Love, the second last publication in her prolific and influential career as an academic scholar, Eve welcomes the reader into the deepest corners of her mind, exposing her battle with cancer and subsequent depression. Delving into her past with psychotherapist Shannon, the intricacies of her upbringing are revealed through a retelling of the therapeutic process they undertake. Told with the use of excerpts from Shannon’s notes, and haibun - a traditional Japanese travel narrative which combines prose and haiku - Eve documents the process of working through the most formative moments of her life. A Dialogue is a touchingly profound psychoanalytic memoir which illuminates the ways that love can manifest in the most unsuspected places. For Eve, finding the “hidden treasure” that Shannon has to offer may not be the cure, but it will help her continue to live.
January 21, 2018
My way of paying attention to people is additive, non-narrative. Thus I don't have a sense of change in people, i.e., if I notice something new I don't think "they've changed." Instead, I think, "This is an additional way x is"—grows out of some kind of stress on object permanence, how to keep the same person, a kind of cubist three-dimensionality." (109)
An expansive and generous meditation on intimacy, friendship, mental health and mortality. Subverting tired stereotypes of "patient" and "psychoanalyst", this text presents new perspectives on how therapy might evolve past notions of expert and amateur, the "sick" and the "well." Eve and her therapist Shannon's encounters are fragile and surprising, and their conversations, as well as her lively and detailed descriptions of what is left unspoken between them, are illuminating. She writes especially vividly about the mind and the body, and how the way her judgement of her body has changed throughout the course of her intertwined romantic and professional life.
An expansive and generous meditation on intimacy, friendship, mental health and mortality. Subverting tired stereotypes of "patient" and "psychoanalyst", this text presents new perspectives on how therapy might evolve past notions of expert and amateur, the "sick" and the "well." Eve and her therapist Shannon's encounters are fragile and surprising, and their conversations, as well as her lively and detailed descriptions of what is left unspoken between them, are illuminating. She writes especially vividly about the mind and the body, and how the way her judgement of her body has changed throughout the course of her intertwined romantic and professional life.
January 10, 2008
i really love this book, and eve sedgewick for writing it. it's a memoir account of her own therapy, over the course of a few years i think.
her prose is beautiful, interspersed with haiku that pinpoint moments and create a sense of space in the text. she also includes her therapist's notes, and i love the way that she takes them from him & weaves them into her narrative of the process.
just to note: it's kind of slow moving. it glows with feeling more than it sparks with brilliance. i like that.
her prose is beautiful, interspersed with haiku that pinpoint moments and create a sense of space in the text. she also includes her therapist's notes, and i love the way that she takes them from him & weaves them into her narrative of the process.
just to note: it's kind of slow moving. it glows with feeling more than it sparks with brilliance. i like that.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews