22 Minutes of Unconditional Love: A Novel

Description

Judith is an ambitious book editor in her late twenties living and working in New York City. Inexperienced with romantic love, she works hard, sees a small group of friends, and visits Dr. Munch, her beloved therapist, on whom she is dependent. Three weeks after her therapist's death, Judith reluctantly attends a cocktail party. Her life changes the instant she meets Howard Rose, a charismatic and commanding lawyer thirteen years her senior with whom she becomes sexually obsessed. Swept off her feet, everything she does is now about Howard: He calls her at work, instructs her on what to wear to dinner, and takes control of her body and sexuality with complete ownership. Judith becomes dependent on the push-pull of their sexual entanglement and on Howard's attention and approval, convinced she's found the man of her dreams. Until, that is, she understands he's the man of her nightmares: hostile, reckless, and manipulative, he seems intent on obliterating any sense of self and autonomy that Judith possesses. Escaping Howard's grasp - and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control - becomes her mission. Narrated by a Howard-free Judith years later, Daphne Merkin's 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love charts the persistent hold our pasts have on us. Stylistically varied and punctuated by provocative ruminations on love, family, sex, gender, and relationships, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love is a psychologically voracious descent into sexual obsession, the story of the hazardous extent to which one woman will go to achieve erotic bliss, and of her resolve to reclaim her agency.

Daphne Merkin is the author of several books, including the essay collection The Fame Lunches and the memoir This Close to Happy. She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and she is widely published in The New York Times, Bookforum, Travel + Leisure, W, Vogue, Elle, and other publications. She has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount College, and Hunter College. She lives in New York City.

An arresting novel that explores the alchemy of contradictions that exist in all great works of literature. Observant and witty, Merkin makes each sentence pack a provocative wallop. So, come for the promise of a compulsively readable novel -- 'Obsession makes for good copy, ' the narrator tells us -- and stay for a fascinating lesson on the making of art. --Adrienne Brodeur, The New York Times Book Review An unguarded immersion into a period of 'erotic servitude' . . . Merkin's novel is casting back to an earlier era of feminism that prioritized sexual satisfaction . . . This is a study of sex as a great and terrible adventure, a bad decision that Judith will think longingly about for years to come. --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal Merkin's novel is several things: a metafictional romance, a ballad of doomed eroticism, a snapshot of single womanhood in New York City whose trappings (pay phones, pantyhose) have been lost to the sands of time. But it is also an unsettling script-flipper in the vein of Hitchcock's voyeuristic thriller, slick and deftly seductive, inviting you to look over its shoulder into the depths of one woman's sexual obsession--only to find her staring back at you, accusatory and coy. --Kat Rosenfield, Tablet There's a hush over Daphne Merkin's 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love, as if the novel had been written in the middle of the night, where the work-a-day is suspended and morning is in another life . . . You may find you're almost holding your breath. --Evan Harris, The East Hampton Star [A] wily tale of carnal obsession . . . Merkin is at her sly and provocative best as her brainy, candid, and witty protagonist intermittently interrupts the erotic spell of her addiction to address the reader and question everything from gender roles to therapy to the very nature of fiction. With psychological acuity, sexual heat . . . Merkin's incisive novel of a woman piloting herself through the wildfire of sexual obsession is as boldly canny as it is cleverly diverting. --Booklist "Daphne Merkin puts into words observations that have mystified me forever. Like Milan Kundera, she knows how to get inside the sexual mind without making the reader cringe. There is no one who writes better." --Carly Simon "Daphne Merkin meets the formidable challenge of describing female lust and romantic obsession with all the desired daring, candor, and skill. The result is a bracingly honest, keenly insightful, utterly compelling book." --Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend "22 Minutes of Unconditional Love is a very strong book, full of echoes and recognitions and interest on many levels--personal, literary, sociological, philosophical. Its take on the freedoms and constraints of feminism is much needed. Daphne Merkin's prose has some of the shocking exhilaration of early Edna O'Brien." --Margaret Drabble, author of The Dark Flood Rises "Daphne Merkin has written a novel as vexing and bright as a Rubik's Cube. 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love is an anti-romance about a woman's profane and humiliating desire to be defined by love." --Catherine Lacey, author of Pew "Sometimes desire is a catastrophe. You can be a supremely brainy woman and not have the first clue about your predilections, until the wrong man comes along and introduces you to them. Daphne Merkin gives us an exquisitely rendered philosophical mystery about the divided self, and the awkward fact that we don't necessarily choose what arouses us." --Laura Kipnis, author of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus