I think something really evil and great to do to a friend with a broken heart is suggest they read A Lover’s Discourse. It’s something that was done to me a few years ago when I was kind of obsessed with this guy I barely knew, and a friend said ‘oh, that’s a rare gift to feel so deeply,’ so they gave me A Lover’s Discourse to deepen the feeling. I felt like Hansel and Gretel following Barthes’s collection of lovers, lollipop by lollipop, toward feeling! My friend was right. Even if the romance doesn’t work, it’s a beautiful and rare thing to feel those emotions so deeply, to sit and think about the nature of love, of longing, and to be connected to all those literary sufferers from broken hearts. Hovering over your phone waiting for a call, a message, a sign of the beloved is a universal experience and not a something to suffer in solitude. Recently, I passed that advice on to a friend who was going through a similarly tortured love affair. He read A Lover’s Discourse and sent me page after underlined page, always with a message like ‘I hate you for having me read this, but damn, yeah.’ Just a recommendation.
-Zoe Dubno