Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis

by Laura Kipnis

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world?

COVID-19 has produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will its cultural afterlife be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did within gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional silos or coupled cocoons, despite the fact that, pre-COVID, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans?

Just as COVID revealed our nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis weaves (often hilariously) her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences together with those of others and sets them against a larger the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, and the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, mapping their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Relationships, Sociology, Audiobook, Memoir, Love

224 pages, Hardcover

First published February 8, 2022

About the author

Laura Kipnis is the author of Against Love: A Polemic; How to Become A Scandal; The Female Thing; Bound and Gagged; and the upcoming Men: Notes from an Ongoing Observation (out in November). Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She's written essays and criticism for Slate, Harper’s, Playboy, New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. A former filmmaker, she teaches filmmaking at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago and New York.

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

We all know that the pandemic has changed so so much in our lives – and relationships, especially romantic relationships, are certainly no exception. Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis purports to look at the ways in which covid and its restrictions and isolation and the incredible amount of time that people are suddenly spending with their partners/families/cohabitation buddies has impacted relationships of all stripes.

COVID-19 has produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will its cultural afterlife be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did within gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional siloes or coupled cocoons, despite the fact that, pre-COVID, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans?

Honestly, I wish I had DNFed this one. The early publicity info the publisher says that this is a “darkly funny investigation” into the above questions, but it just comes off as disjointed, like it was written by the stereotypical angry feminist undergrad who’s trying so hard to be edgy and provocative that they just end up stringing together random thoughts and missing the point of the assignment all together.

That’s not a trope that I use lightly. Look, I have two masters degrees, so I’m used to heady works, including those that can push the envelope, and given my fields of study, feminist literature and theories weaved into my grad work often. This isn’t a context with which I am unfamiliar. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling of that trope all the way through the book.

Kipnis spends a great deal of time on #MeToo, but doesn’t really make the connection between the movement and its resulting impacts and the main thesis of the book. Yes, the movement gained major traction before the pandemic and we’ve all had lots (and lots) of alone time to think on it over the last two years, but ultimately, bringing it up feels like nothing more than a venue for railing on “ugly” old men that Kipnis finds to be worthy of public berating. Yes, it’s great that “an international plague of shitty men was being exposed and dethroned,” but the manner in which Kipnis takes this on just felt juvenile and vindictive – not educated and empowered and actionable.

It felt like Kipnis expects that every hetero female out there to be disgusted by the “male-female thing.” I mean, yes, there are definitely parts of the socially-constructed hetero relationship that need to change (and have changed), but not every hetero female is “in a conflicted position” over their relationships and wants to wash their hands of it or “choose queerness.” Umm, what? I’m not even sure where to start with that last gem.

And I’m sorry, but the last chapter just felt like I was reading a trashy rag. I hate the phrase, but I just can’t even…

Be provocative. Push boundaries. Get angry. Make people uncomfortable. That’s often what research and writing is about. But please, make a cogent point.

So, long story short, I want my two days of reading time back. I’m sure this book will find an audience with which it resonates, but this was a massive swing and a miss for me.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a collection of 4 solid COVID-era essays, in her signature style of valuaing ambivalence and pushing beyond platitudes.

Here are choice quotes from each chapter:

1. "Love and extinction," on cohabiting during the pandemic

Wow, there are so many ways that people’s inner lives just refuse to budge, so many ways that we use each other as convenient projection screens, as showcased in the rotelike repetition of domestic argumentation: the “who did what to whom” argument; the “why did you say x” argument; the “tone of voice” argument; the “you always” argument; the “you said you’d” argument; the “we already discussed that” argument. The “you’re not talking about me you’re talking about your mother” stratagem. The endless intractable little habits and compulsions, the hamster wheel of ancient calcified wounds and grudges—it’s almost like there’s some buried streak of deadness at the core of every living human psyche, getting a head start on the mortality thing.

Yes, it’s hard to let things go sometimes. Grudges, for example, which litter the domestic landscape like magazines you can’t bear to throw away but know you’ll never read, and if you’re like me (a grudge-collector par excellence) they get piled higher and higher until you have to forge paths between the stacks just to get to the bathroom. “The secret life of grudges,” as Adam Phillips puts it. Maybe there’s a little Cleghorn in all of us—obviously making a mess of things is not unknown in the annals of human behavior, and there are so many versions of emotional detritus too. I guess you have to love each other for the mess you are, and hope to be loved in turn, in all your grossness. That undisposed scrum of hair in the tub after your mate takes a bath—intimacy at its most tangible. Isn’t every successful couple a private pact, as with the Cleghorns, to ignore certain glaring things?

Love carves the world into roles. Classically you have the person who loves more and the person who loves less, the one who acts out and the one who puts out the fires, the one who falls apart and the one who glues back the pieces. Coupledom is organized around capacities and defenses: having shut yourself off from feelings, you seek out an emotive mate, then berate them for their over-emotionality. Or you’re a control freak with a mate whose life is in perpetual chaos, which you secretly despise but also keeps you engaged since carping about their irresponsibility is (secretly) a welcome distraction from facing your own problems. All of which COVID ruthlessly exposed or remorselessly accelerated—like maybe you’d affianced yourself to the life of the party and suddenly there’s no party, just four walls and Netflix. What now? COVID jettisoned the divertissements, for instance all the other people who’d made coupled life sustainable, leaving you face-to-face with: each other.

Maybe it’s the things we’re most split about that hold us tightest in their grip.

2. "Vile Bodies: Heterosexuality and Its Discontents," on gender politics - how disgust at males became a possible psychological state only with female emancipation, as well as the related constant increase in the sense of sexuality as contagion

The fact is that women finding men disgusting is a modern achievement. As literary scholar Ruth Perry outlines in her wryly titled essay “Sleeping with Mr. Collins,” female sexual disgust was little evident prior to the eighteenth century, and even as late as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), when Charlotte Lucas marries the repellent Mr. Collins in a “pragmatic match” and talks things over post-nuptials with her girlfriends, there’s no hint that having sex or sharing a bed with an odious man was repellent. Perry’s point is that sex didn’t have the same psychological resonance as it does for the contemporary psyche. To the modern sensibility, marriage to a man you find repellent is a version of prostitution; in former times it was routine. Perry herself clearly feels so much physical repugnance at the idea of sleeping with Mr. Collins she’s practically shuddering on the page.

In other words, heightened levels of sexual delicacy didn’t just spring from within our deepest beings, it was tied to material considerations. Which makes me wonder how much women’s increasing financial independence, including the option to live life without a man or choose queerness in any of its flavors, has contributed to men seeming so much more encroaching and disgusting these days, including their jokes and mild overtures? To put the question in more sweeping terms, can heterosexuality survive gender parity?

We’re badly held together by social mores and the threat of punishment, which is how we become such good compartmentalizers. We’re afflicted with bizarre amoral dreams on a nightly basis. Our fantasy lives don’t always comport with progressive ideas about who we should be. You go to work and have to pretend you don’t have genitals under your clothes, and that your coworkers don’t either. Some say “keeping it zipped” is more of a problem for natal men, given a physiology that externalizes desires more blatantly; humans without penises are (some say) less beset. But women can be weirdos and sadists too: the worst fictions about us are that our natures are pacific and oppression has made us nobler people. Online feminism is itself a playground of bullying and viperishness, most of it under the banner of rectitude.

Knowing that the boundaries of what’s acceptable and what isn’t keep jumping around and reversing, shouldn’t moral pronouncements come with more humility, not wrapped in the cloak of timeless universality?

3. "Love on the Rocks: “Codependency” and Its Vicissitudes"

Free will? The longer you’re coupled with someone the more you realize what a fiction it is, to the extent that coupled intimacy means that a map of someone else’s interior life has been sutured onto your own, which can of course feel very gratifying—closeness, finishing each other’s sentences—and also incredibly stultifying, the more conversant you get with the monotony of someone else’s impasses. You know the exact moment their defenses will kick in, or petulance, or temper; you find yourself involuntarily tensing up because your body knows before “you do” when an eruption is coming. Long-term coupledom is like attending the world’s most protracted dysfunctional psychology seminar (or maybe living in Kafka’s penal colony, except you’re being tattooed with the spouse’s crimes instead of your own).

I should pause here to note that there are a lot of good reasons people don’t write candidly about relationships they’re currently in and attempting to sustain (you’re obviously not going to write about your sex life—even when it’s really great!—if you ever want to have sex with the person again, which leaves a big chunk of coupled reality unsayable), meaning we have few “unvarnished” accounts of what actually transpires in these realms. You don’t wish to betray your mate, you don’t wish to betray yourself. Tone control is an endemic hazard—the amusing little aside about that cute foible of the mate’s turns out to reek of hostility, you’ll likely be informed (hopefully before your candid little chronicle hits print), which you somehow failed to notice. The real problem is that you never exactly know what you’re really up to when being “candid,” because a soulmate lives (by definition) as much or more within the confines of your psyche as having an independent existence “in reality,” so you’re essentially scribbling in the dark.

He’s in love with his ghosts, I sometimes think when things aren’t going swimmingly between us, but I guess intimacy means being haunted by another person’s ghosts in addition to your own... Love perforates us, often way too deeply

4. "Love and Chaos," on the youthful trend of being strident policers, while also living in fear, vindictiveness, and denial

Erich Fromm (who came up earlier in the role of Karen Horney’s truculent lover) is helpful on these relays between history and subjectivity: “In order for a society to function, its members must acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the ways they have to act as members of that society.” Which is slightly depressing. To update Fromm: if we’re compelled at this point in history to continuously externalize our most private selves and all the most popular new technologies and genres, from social media to reality TV, are devoted to fostering the project (while strip-mining your inner life for profit), clearly this is the form of subjectivity required of us at this stage in the development of capitalism. Early capitalism piggybacked on the Protestant Ethic, sucking up happy-go-lucky peasants and churning out industrious wage slaves. Digital capitalism wants your data, not your labor, a renewable resource to exploit and profit from by refashioning us all into industrious oversharers.

This is, to be sure, the history of technological innovation in a nutshell: the successive refashioning of our psyches into welcome mats for the latest thing, from the printing press to the telephone. Consider the post-medieval architectural innovation known as the hallway—finally you didn’t have to barge through someone’s bedroom to get to the next room, or they through yours. Everyone got used to having sex behind closed doors, which came to be the norm—and what enormous consequences for psychological life that must have incurred! Now the hallways were being torn down and the bedroom doors flung open again. As our psychologies adjust to the hegemony of the internet and its overlords’ designs for us, it will eventually just feel like “who we are.”

At the same time, there was definitely a glut of “I’m gonna cancel you” and “I’m gonna hold you accountable” in these circles, which Zelda herself was against. They were all supposed to be big prison abolitionists and restorative justice types, but when they got on the internet it was like shame shame, punishment punishment—“I’m going to humble you, I’m going to show the people what you did.” Her view, which I more than shared, was that people have to let go of the cops in their heads, but a lot of her friends weren’t just cops, they were executioners—they literally wanted to make people suffer, which she found despicable. She’d unfollowed people she otherwise admired because they were so fixated on punishing everyone, especially over perceived minor sexual transgressions. The new thing was responding to someone’s tweet with the phrase “Is this you?” and pulling up some years-old out-of-context tweet that contradicted whatever piety the person was now asserting. I asked if she ever worried this could happen to her, and she said that anyone with a brain had already gone back and deleted every past tweet with any incriminating searchable phrase.

[Susan Tunis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yikes! This was suitable bitter reading for a confirmed spinster on Valentine's Day.

[Ella Dawson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book started strong with a fun, merciless essay about the strain that social distancing and isolation put on cohabitating couples during COVID-19, but in later essays it devolved into anecdata and sweeping conclusions about millennials, sexual harassment, power and dating. Felt rushed and self-indulgent.

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is super interesting and thought provoking! A great read if you're interested in probing your own brain about the portrait of love during the time of COVID.

[Alyssa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know how I finished this. I wish the end, “Coda: Antibodies,” was longer or expanded upon.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kipnis could write a recipe for pickles and I'd avidly read it. Each of her books is funny, extremely smart, lucid.

[Desmond Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always a good time reading the wry, contrarian observations of Laura Kipnis. A series of long essays, some great and some not.

[CATHERINE · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise was a lot more interesting than the book. This felt a bit thin on content.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've said it here before: I'm pretty sure Laura Kipnis is my favorite living prose stylist. Maybe I don't even need the "living" qualifier. She makes more astute observations about contemporary life than anyone I can think of, she has the guts and the chops to wade into the most forbidding thickets of controversy and ill-will and I find her tone irresistibly seductive. Not that I'm inclined, at this point in my gaga fandom, to do much resisting. I can't think of another writer who is so wickedly funny while maintaining an admirably compassionate outlook on human foibles.

I have been a big fan since her popular breakout, Against Love: A Polemic, to which the present title is something of a sequel. That book was a bold defense of adultery and a relentless skewering of some of our received ideas about romantic love, most pointedly the nostrum that love, while rewarding, is necessarily a lot of work. Her boldest premise in that book, for which she makes a fairly convincing case, is that one of the primary functions of coupledom in our culture is as an enforcement mechanism for the dictates of capitalism. Accepting that love is a job, we are trained by our most intimate circumstances to endure the compromises and humiliations of the workplace. Overargued in places, I suppose, but, as she herself points out, it does say "polemic" right in the title.

While there is an undeniable playing-the-classic-album-straight-through-tour quality to this revisitation, the fact that we've all spent a good chunk of the last two years effectively under house arrest certainly resonated with many of the insights of Against Love 's most compelling chapter, "The Domestic Gulag." Soulmates can't become cellmates without puncturing a few illusions. My wife and I enjoyed a lot of privilege in this time. We have city-gigs that we could rely upon and we live in a roomy apartment that enabled us to get away from each other. Pandemic life nevertheless made ordinary disputes feel super-charged, existential even. In this title, Kipnis shares more personal details of her own life and romantic partnership than she has in the past. There is a chapter on substance use and abuse and recovery and codependence in quarantine and another on the continuing cultural reverberations of Me Too. Both of these chapters balanced sharp cultural analysis with uncomfortable personal revelations in a way that I found both rhetorically effective and endearing. The vulnerability present in this book added another layer of excellence to an essayist already working at the top of the form.

Splendid.

[Steve Erickson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kipnis can be insightful, especially about the paradox of the hyper-judgmental attitude of Left Twitter, but most of this book just repeats stories of her friends and people she heard about on social media. although she calls herself a socialist, her "hey kids, touch grass and get back to having sex" attitude isn't far from Bari Weiss and her substack compatriots. Frustratingly, the chapter about living with an alcoholic shows promise - the book would've been better as a straight memoir.

[Paul Sand · Rating 1 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

For folks seeing my one-star rating at Goodreads: it's subjective, I just didn't like it. As the kids say (but usually abbreviate): your mileage may vary. It might be useful and insightful to someone else, maybe you. Theoretically possible. But not me.

Why did I read it? Well, it's my library book rule: if I check it out, I have to read it. I might not have checked it out if we were in the pre-Covid days of leisurely library browsing: glancing at a few pages might have caused me to put it back on the shelf. But we've gotten into the habit of putting books on hold online, picking them up a few hours later.

I thought it would be a safer bet. I really liked Kipnis's previous book, Unwanted Advances. I blogged about her conflicts with Kampus Kancel Kulture pretty frequently in the 2017-2018 era: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. But there's not much about that here. No warning signals were emitted when I listened to her interview with Nick Gillespie at Reason. So:

It's purportedly an examination of how the Covid pandemic has affected our intimate relationships, with callbacks to the AIDS disaster of the 1980s. There's precious little actual data on that here; Kipnis relies mainly on her own experience, and those revealed to her by her acquaintances. An example is her fourth chapter, in which she talks about her Zooming with an ex-student "Zelda", described as "queer, Black, and very online". Sample paragraph describing a social media incident Zelda had to deal with:

So why had [Frank] sent [Zelda] Camille's tweets? "Okay, this is kind of messy," she said, laughing a little self-consciously. Zelda had known that Frank knew Camille—in fact she'd first encountered Camille on one of Frank's social media pages, and texted him when she and Camille first started dating to say "Wow, Camille's cute and kind of cool." Frank hadn't at first told Zelda that he'd also had a brief thing with Camille until Zelda said, "You're acting weird, like did you sleep with her," and he said yeah, and Zelda was like, okay whatever. Frank also knew Olivia, Zelda's current girlfriend, and he was just scrolling through his timeline and saw Camille's tweets, figured they were about Zelda and probably thought, Camille's making a fool of herself, so I'm gonna screenshot these tweets because they'll be gone soon.

The legend of Zelda takes up about 40 pages of this 210-page book. I was uninterested the whole way through, but really uninterested in that.

But guess what? "Queer, Black" folks have fraught relationships, just like white heterosexuals. Things are certainly exacerbated when a large chunk of that aspect of their lives is revealed in social media. (To show off my fuddy-duddiness, being promiscuously sex-obsessed is probably adding to the drama.)

That's not all, but that's enough. I was occasionally amused by Kipnis's prose artistry, but she's just not speaking to me here.

[Abhi V · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bad for many reasons, occasionally nonetheless insightful, especially about relationships. It horrifies me how bad people are at relationships (at least as shown in this book) and how incompetently and self-servingly and irrationally they go about them (our lives are short and we are made of our experiences—we need to get serious), I guess it made me very pessimistic I could ever marry a conventional woman. (Or is it that intelligent, liberal people have unlearned best practices because their overall competence allows them to afford it?) The portrait of liberal culture likewise horrified me and the author's indulgence of it—even if it is after all the world in which she lives—makes her almost impossible to take seriously, and jars starkly with the human insight she elsewhere reveals. The stuff about COVID was a period piece although it is strange that COVID did not have an AIDS-like effect (as she logically suggested it might), somehow we have all just forgotten and ignore it, maybe because we all at some level understood how ridiculous it was? Such a liberal book I guess bolsters her credentials for her early, better book about Title IX, where I thought at the time her self-description as a leftist feminist was if not wrong then at least doomed. But no, I guess she really is one, and it's sad, because in the first book she seemed so august, and in this book—whose fourth section recounts at length the idiocy and melodrama of the lives of "queer prison abolitionist" 20-somethings—really brings her low. In the earlier book she mentions her hatred of slogans (and their supplanting of reasoning), but in this book she gives into them, at one point saying that the language of trauma and PTSD are now are vocabulary for emotional experience, and that we may as well give in: How completely at odds.... In both there were concerning passages (I think of her references to reality and crime TV and the relative paucity of references to great thinkers or writers beside some Freudians—there were more though) but in the first book she came across as serious, severe, intelligent, knowing, independent and interpersonally wise in a way that wasn't sustained in this book. The section on the alcoholic was the best, the first was very mixed but bad, the fourth was shockingly embarrassing and should never have been published or even composed. I both enjoyed the ending (a survey of impressions about love during COVID) and was alarmed by it, I said already that I can't imagine living in relationships like these, and ultimately will need a wife with matched eccentricities.... The best of Kipnis (her combination of feminism, a specific kind of female toughness (I think of Mary Ann Douglas), and a Freudian discernment about the true nature of our desires, needs, and actions—which are altogether at odds with cant and ideology) is I guess already probably in Paglia, who is anyway better for many other reasons as well.

[Elizabeth Tuttle · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Kipnis does well is what she always does - provides a scathingly honest assessment of romantic relationships between couples, here focusing on the state of romance in 2020.

The premise of the book is half the intrigue. We, the living, had not endured a pandemic and anything resembling its lockdown until 2020, and so relationships had not been selected with this criteria in mind. How couples fared under these strenuous conditions seems to have been a mixed bag, but Kipnis complements our commonplace anecdotes we have heard from friends and family about their relationships with case stories and a bit of psychological (loosely psychoanalytic) analysis.

The second chapter provides some comprehensive context to the state of heterosexual communication leading up to the pandemic. As a culture, we have shifted towards an increase in puritanical ethics by taking a conversation about rape and abuses of power and turning it into an increasing set of HR-style rules around sex, leaving no room for eroticism to flourish without the invisible hand of bureaucratic approval processes.

The first and last chapters are those which most directly address changes during the pandemic itself. I'd like to see a greater connection between her tail end of the second chapter, concluding by mentioning friends who had mid-lockdown mentioned longing for the touch of stranger during an otherwise puritanical sexual moment, and the online anecdotes and psychological analysis of sexual/romantic relationships as they are since the lockdown.

Most out of place is her chapter on codependency, not because it doesn't warrant treatment in this type of diagnostic analysis of relationships, but because the friend Mason she seems to be responding to ultimately does not understand what "codependency" means, and thus the chapter seems strangely built on a lack of understanding. Kipnis is fine to make the point that codependency has many different definitions and is a bit of a "catch all," but I trust she can differentiate from Buzzfeed op-eds and an intellectual treatment of a condition.

If you're expecting a singular thesis crafted like "The pandemic has affected sex and romance in X, Y, Z ways," you will be disappointed. This essay collection is best situated in Kipnis's larger work, spanning from pre-social media critiques of monogamy and discussions of the porn industry to more recent work on feminism and the carceral campus. In the context of her larger project, her musings diagnosing the state of heterosexual coupledom in a post-pandemic and post-MeToo era seem to not make a concrete argument but instead circle around a constant theme: ambivalence and contradiction.

[Jennifer White · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book. Initially, I appreciated Kipnis's perspective on covid; it was as if she were reflecting at what has happened these past three years from the top of a skyscraper. She put this experience into the context of history. I love the way she refers to Trump. I think she calls him "the tyrant" and other names fitting of his reign and personality. Kipnis is funny, and her humor comes through in her writing.

However, soon the book felt like a long diatribe. She rambled. I waited for research to support her ideas. Instead she supported her ideas with "I heard readers around the world" or people she knows or her experiences.

Furthermore, I wanted more storyline so as to better hold onto what she was saying. It was not there.

Finally, I found that her experiences as a childfree woman living in a huge city in the midst of Covid felt very foreign to mine. I know that is not a reason not to read. But I could not relate to her: the "domestic mayhem" of being stuck inside her small one-room apartment with her partner, the increased alcohol consumption in her apartment complex, her anecdotes about the reliance of online life.

Maybe this is a book better suited to those single people living in the city.

[Kathleen Creedon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really poignant since I'm in a new environment & have been watching a lot of rom coms (not to mention the new environment is Rom Com Setting Central).

I think generally this book is interesting, and Kipnis makes a lot of interesting connections between the way relationships occur & how that has changed because of COVID. She does also, however, have many bad takes. For example, the sentence "rough sex gone wrong" without any extra context? Probably doesn't need to be said or categorized that way. I wish this book was queerer, and even though she does incorporate mentions of the queer community, she also said "something something men -- and might as well throw trans men in there too" (don't say men when you mean cis men!!)

Anyways. This was a fine read. Good to listen to on a long walk, but wouldn't recommend for my queer friends.

[Kristen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This one sucked me in with an interesting topic but only made me want to warn people away from it. Too many random thoughts and personal experiences strung together for me, but the real problems came in the second section. The author clearly doesn't understand why victims of abuse and violence stay with or keep returning to their abusers, and her comments about that come across as disparaging the victims and belittling the incredible pain of their experiences. Extra problematic when she's discussing the power dynamics of this kind of assault and abuse by media moguls and a former U.S. president. Extra extra problematic when she's a university professor who I really would've hoped was better educated.

Also, fair warning: She recounts numerous details of sexual abuse and violence by powerful men in ways that can be incredibly triggering.

[Nicole H · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked this book up because the central topic was interesting and I love feminist theory, but the title and description are misleading. The author seems dedicated to misery, using examples of why her and her friends’ relationships failed during Covid as universal truths.
The takeaways: Married people actually hate each other, if a couple days they’re happy they’re lying, instagram is ruining intimacy, Me Too has made women retreat from romance into paranoia… I didn’t take a single thing of value from this book.

The book was a waste of time and energy. It actually made me sad for the author that she is so miserable and sees it as a sign of superiority. Love affected us all in many different ways during the pandemic. Read someone else’s opinion on the topic instead.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim from Libby and it’s BAD. The first essay about COVID is interesting. But the second essay about MeToo feels disconnected and goes off the rails. The author seems overly sympathetic to sexual predators. After researching her a bit further, she's definitely too lenient on predators. The third essay about alcoholism is equally disjointed. The final essay tries to tie back to COVID-19 through a vicarious look at the dating life of the author's former student which comes off very dry and uninteresting, even though the student herself seems like a fun person. Between the author's attitude and the disjointed and frankly bad writing, this is a DNF at 80 percent for me.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a pleasure to read.
While the second half meanders a bit and can be seen as rambling personal anecdotes…but with enough brought to the table to render respect toward (shudders with neuroses to outside parties and own mindscapes not included) bravery? Honesty? Hmmm all debatable I suppose, but Kipnis makes me feel less alone in this circus of social norms and sexual politics and for that I’m forever grateful, as the combination of research, humor, and subjectivity frame a gleefully combative and questioning view I’m more comfortable with than most I encounter. The first half made me want to research and write again, so that’s magical.

[Mazelit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kipnis is by far one of my favorite essayists, and I was excited to learn she was publishing yet another book. In this book, she brings the same beautiful writing and insight as she did in her former books, but the topic just was... meh. Pandemic sucked. We get it.

She is such a talented writer, and nonetheless, I hope that she writes more books in the future ^_^

(Disclaimer: I only read 3/4ths of this book, I just gave up on it about 70 percent of the way through).

[Becca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting takes and moments of insight ("...everyone loves psychoanalyzing Freud as if the idea that he too had an unconscious discredits him rather than proving his brilliance"). Did give me some nuggets to think about.

I picked up the book to see what Kipnis "discovered" about COVID relationships. I was disappointed with a fairly narrow view on relationships that overall made me sad.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing revelatory here to be honest. Feels mostly in between memoir and lukewarm takes on lockdown vibes, without either style going deep enough to make it scorch. As soon as I saw 'video artist' in the bio, I was like ahhhh. Sorry, video artists!

[Lorri Steinbacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I'm just not ready to dissect the pandemic experience yet.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts out well but then gets lost and I wasn’t sure anymore what her point is. The last section going on and on about some twentysomething’s love life is especially boring.

Comma splices abound.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF - I couldn't get into this book. Life is too short to struggle through uninteresting/annoying books.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning was promising, but it lost the point somewhere along the way

[Marty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh...

[Sean Kinch · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many quotable lines. On Covid lockdown: “when the music stopped, we were all face-to-face with our romantic choices and compromises, like it or not.”

[Rosalind · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book but felt that I was not fully understanding all of what was being said. I am curious about Laura Kipnis’ other books.