A Dialogue on Love

When she begins therapy for depression after breast cancer treatment, the author brings with her an extraordinarily open and critical mind, but also shyness about revealing herself. Resisting easy responses to issues of dependence, desire, and mortality, she warily commits to a male therapist who shares little of her cultural and intellectual world. Although not without pain, their improvised relationship is as unexpectedly pleasurable as her writing is unconventional: Sedgwick combines dialogue, verse, and even her therapist's notes to explore her interior life--and delivers and delicate and tender account of how we arrive at love.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) was a leading gender and critical theorist. Instrumental in developing queer theory, her published works include Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire; Epistemology of the Closet; Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity; and A Dialogue of Love. Sedgwick studied at Cornell University and Yale University, and taught at many institutions including Boston University, Dartmouth College, and Duke University.