Excerpts from love is a four-letter word

“It’s always nice to know that no matter how badly you’ve screwed up your love life, someone else has done far, far worse.”—Neal Pollack

“Apparently, my ex-sucia heard about our planned trip from a mutual friend and decided in a fit of vengeance, jealousy, justice, cruelty, transparency (please pick one) to give us an early bon-voyage gift: an ‘anonymous’ letter to my novia that revealed my infidelities in excruciating detail.”—Junot DÍaz, “Homecoming, with Turtle”

“It seemed too much to ask for a relationship based on mutual attraction, but I would certainly settle for one that took place on a barren landscape of glowing rubble. Never mind that it was the sort of thing that had little chance for the long term, at least not without hazmat suits.”—Wendy McClure, “The Last Man on Earth”

“It was terrifying and amazing, having a secret identity. It was like I was Clark Kent and Lois Lane, all my own damned self, both the experiment and the control.”
—Jennifer Finney Boylan, “Trans”

“I was twenty-two and dating a thirty-two-year-old divorced hypochondriac who had a condo out by the freeway, made her living as an aerobics instructor, and who was convinced she and her love of self-help books could make a well-organized, ambitious, proactive, so-called normal man of me.”—Dan Kennedy, “Exactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older. And with Hypochondria.”

“The first time I ever got drunk was in the spring of 1978, in a hotel room in Mazatlán, Mexico. I was fifteen and with a thirty-six-year-old man who was perfectly frank about the fact that he wanted to seduce me.”—Kate Christensen, “Shadow Dancing”

“I met Amy at a moment of desperation in my life. I was twenty-four years old and fully convinced that I would one day be a famous actor if I could only make it out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”—SaÏd Sayrafiezadeh, “Runaway Train”

“Jake and I would have sex anywhere: golf courses, libraries, busy parking lots, other peoples’ closets, driving down the highway. Once we did it in a hotel room while his mother was awake and lying in the next bed.”—Maud Newton, “Conversations You Have at Twenty”

“I’d been indoctrinated to believe that if I were to touch another nude body before marriage I would either find myself hooked on drugs, pregnant with crack babies, or dead of AIDS. In the Reagan era, it didn’t as much matter if one went through puberty gay or straight, as long as you went through it fearing for your life.”—Josh Kilmer-Purcell, “Twenty-five to One Odds”

“On Jackson Bishop, Christian jewelry was sexy. He wore a wooden cross on a leather thong that swung gently or pounded on his football player’s chest when he strummed the guitar or played the piano. Until he was saved, he’d committed loads of sins.”—Margaret Sartor, “The First Time”

“According to the very book I held in my hands when we met, there was always a catch. Romance was possible, but romance was also doomed. Love could turn you into something else, an exalted being, but you could also end up a tree, a rock, a fountain, an antlered animal chased by hounds.”—Michael Taeckens, “The Book of Love and Transformation”

“He was raised in a nice suburb and had always been something of a gifted child. He seemed interested in my background and nicknamed me ‘little ghetto girl.’ I’m sure he meant it in the nicest way.”—Lynda Barry, “Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend”

“It was the first time in my life I’d ever had to send an apology card after sex.”
—Emily Flake, “Why Won’t You Just Love Me?”

“Dear Ugly, I will never love you. NEVER. I am going to California.”
—Patty Van Norman, “Dear Ugly”

“And there I was at the other end of the platform, her lover—a short, hairy, overly civilized hamster waiting for his monumental girlfriend to bend down and embrace him and smack him on the lips. After which she would start to cry.”—Gary Shteyngart, “Texas”

“It was during our idyll on the houseboat that I realized why I was so weepy, and why I’d thrown up so much on the bus to Kashmir: It wasn’t the crowding or the cigarette smoke or the earsplitting videos of tinny Hindi love songs that melded into the chatter all around us. My period was two weeks late.”—Michelle Green, “Love and War Stories”

“Do we fall in love or in like or have sex or try to so that, when it goes bad, we can tell a story about it? Is it that when the relationship goes bad, which it almost always does, we at least have the story to keep us warm? Or, would we rather have the story we know is good than the relationship that might turn out bad?”—Brock Clarke, “Leave Me Something When You Leave Me”

“Like he saw it in a movie once and decided if he could just do that he would be the best lover ever and then he never decided to learn any other trick again. A one-trick pony. You picture him whinnying and waving a long, dirty mane in the air. Pawing the ground sadly.”
—Jami Attenberg, “The Story You Will Tell”

“I might’ve peed two gallons into the litter box. I’m talking the cat litter floated up. I secured the lid, told the cat to have a nice life with the Remora, and left.”
—George Singleton, “Marking Territory”

“When I think about it now, I can understand the Dateline NBC stories about those women married to serial killers—the wives who blithely freshen the makeup on the decapitated heads in the fridge while their husbands are disarticulating the limbs in the basement.”
—D. E. Rasso, “The Rules of Repulsion”

“But now I was facing a real relationship and, suddenly, fantasies of that mysterious girl from the train began to rear up again—fantasies that were exciting and international and often appropriated scenes from arty French movies.”—Pasha Malla, “Just Like the Movies”

“With consistent torrents of water pouring down on me, turning an already heavy bag heavier, man-made switchbacks, to me, suddenly felt personal, racist even. Billy brought me to an anti-Semitic mountain!”—Amanda Stern, “Scout’s Honor”

“The messages on my answering machine became weirder and more frequent. And the later they occurred at night, the more slurred and drunken the monologues. He wanted me. I was intriguing. He wanted to show me Cher’s Sanctuary catalogue because it was ‘amazing,’ and I’m such a rock-and-roll guy that I was sure to love the stuff she had in there.”
—Dave White, “This Guy Who Was My Boyfriend for Like Three Weeks”

“It is 2008 and Jim is dead. He laughs into my ear, close as ever, far away as ever. This is fun, isn’t it? he says. It’s sort of just like being with me, isn’t it? Only a lot more exciting.”—Wendy Brenner, “I Love You in Twelve Languages”