Guised as an instructive manual, A Handbook For My Lover chronicles six years in the life of an unconventional affair between a young writer and her lover, a photographer twice her age.
This beautifully written epistle documents the young woman’s demands and desires, her fantasies and eccentricities as she negotiates the minefield that is their relationship in the absence of any destination.
As the author says, “The Handbook essentially is a series of letters addressed to the lover. Any other reader is a voyeur that is almost intercepting these exchanges, reading them guiltily, as if peering through a hole to watch two people making love. It is in that sense that the book is erotic. It arouses the reader because it plays with her imagination. It rests in between the fictive and the real.”
A Handbook For My Loveris a memoir that revels in the ephemeral pleasures of everyday moments. Feisty and provocative, it is an examination of the shifting equations of power and vulnerability within the intimacies of love and lovemaking.
