"Extreme Solitude" by Jeffrey Eugenides.

A short story by one of my favourite writers ever. Published in the New Yorker, June 7th, 2010.

My favourite part so far:

"For a book purportedly about love, the Barthes didn’t look very romantic. The cover was a sombre chocolate brown. Opening to the introduction, she began to read:

"The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude."

Outside, the temperature, which had been below freezing for the past week, had shot up to the fifties. The resulting thaw was alarming in its suddenness, drainpipes and gutters dripping, sidewalks puddling, streets flooded, a constant sound of water rushing downhill.

Madeleine had her windows open on the liquid darkness. She sucked the spoon and read on:

"What we have been able to say below about waiting, anxiety, memory is no more than a modest supplement offered to the reader to be made free with, to be added to, subtracted from, and passed on to others: around the figure, the players pass the handkerchief which sometimes, by a final parenthesis, is held a second longer before handing it on. (Ideally, the book would be a cooperative: “To the United Readers and Lovers.”)"

It wasn’t only that this writing seemed beautiful to Madeleine. It wasn’t only that these opening sentences of Barthes’s made immediate sense, were readable, digestible. It wasn’t Madeleine’s relief at recognizing that here, at last, was a book she might write her final paper on. What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude."

Extreme Solitude