Love, If That's What It Is
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
For fans of Marriage Story and Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment
Terri runs off with a lover, abandoning her children and her marriage of twenty-five years. Her husband, David, is left to take care of their two daughters, one of whom is falling in love for the first time. These four people start to question their identity outside the nuclear family. What remains of a disintegrated home, and what changes? Marijke Schermer’s Love, If That’s What It Is gives a kaleidoscopic view of a divorce, permitting the reader to enter the heads of not only the spouses, but also of the two daughters and the divorcees’ new lovers. Through several characters, the reader is presented with just as many views on relationships, while Schermer remains impartial and thus confronts readers with their own—perhaps shaky—romantic principles. What is love? With fresh flair and provocative perspectives, Schermer manages to provide an original and versatile answer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dutch playwright Schermer explores themes of romantic ennui and individuality in her scintillating debut, a yearlong account of a deteriorating marriage. After 25 years with David, Terri is at a crossroads: once attracted to her husband's loyalty, steadiness, and dependability, she is now repulsed by his stick-in-the-mud demeanor. After she tells David about her lover, Lucas, an adventurous if nihilistic bachelor, David is floored, as are their children. Their teenage daughter, Krista, copes by pursuing a secret romance, and their younger daughter, Ally, tells Terri to "stop hurting Daddy." Several months later, David finds his own lover, Sev, on a dating app. Schermer's crisp prose style captures the heart-wrenching emotions roiling the characters. Of David's whirlwind of guilt and pleasure over his relationship with Sev, a single mother whom he sees only in her apartment, Schermer writes that he's found "not a relationship, just this island in time." The author expertly humanizes each of the characters' desires and flaws as she illuminates the raw, inner workings of a broken marriage. This is as cathartic as it is gut-churning.
