Another Love Discourse

Edie Meidav’s Another Love Discourse is an uncategorizable triumph, and a gesture of radical intimacy with the reader, one of which Barthes would be proud.
-Jonathan Lethem

Edie Meidav is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and this is her best book, in a success of very strong books. It’s open, wounded, true.
— Rick Moody

Claire Messud says: Edie Meidav’s Another Love Discourse shatters boundaries and expectations: her narrative voice—urgent, lyrical, raw—compels the reader into uncommon and intense intimacy. This powerful book will stay with you.

A lyric novel about the play of grief, empathy, new and old love, and the quest to overcome blindness in human relations.
Caught in the cross-currents of a fraught divorce and a new love, the death of her mother, and a global pandemic, a writer plunges into an obsession with the work of 1960s French philosopher Roland Barthes. Her struggles to make sense of his work and life–and of what can happen to a woman’s settled life in a single harrowing year–result in an engrossing, funny, earthy, and innovative lyric work. The quest for authenticity in motherhood, sexuality, and tenancy on the earth and in the home, as well as the unusual lyric form, make the novel unified in spirit yet transdisciplinary in approach.

Edie Meidav’s dazzling new novel, Another Love Discourse, is a memorably courageous, genre-defying inquiry into those two life-altering numinosities—love and loss. In this time of collective confusion and terror, Meidav has given us a guidebook for the depths. The wisdoms offered are multiple and timely; her telling is masterful, rendered as intimately as the lines on our own hands.
-Dale Kushner

A lush plunge into the sensorium: marriage, divorce, discovery. Meidav turns her fierce intellect to timeless questions of love, its attendant ecstasy and delicious pain. This book will unlock you.
-Margot Douaihy

How do we metabolize despair? How do we re-imagine and re-member ourselves when the ground of self has been ravaged and the known world lies in ruin? These are some of the questions the author unflinchingly sets forth to answer. She writes: “Who among us has not been thrust out of our past as much as shut within?”

Following the death of her mother, an alluring and complicated woman, and the dissolution of her marriage, Meidav embarks on a descent into the underworld companioned by her guardian spirit, Roland Barthes.

In the underworld she recognizes and embraces her authentic self, hidden away during childhood. Memories of her deceased parents emerge to clarify the ancestral burden of displacement, persecution, and dread. An electrifying new love appears. Maternal care is never far from her mind. Wherever she nests with her three daughters, indomitable mother love infuses the days of hard labor and nights: spaghetti dinners and raucous girl-dancing. Chaos, and the darkest human feelings, edge near and retreat. The tectonic plates shift, and shift again.
-Dale Kushner