Adding this title to my 2020 reading list now that it's been officially released.
Here's the blurb I wrote for it:
This book is as wry as its tongue-in-cheek title, self-aware and scorchingly honest, like the big sister or best friend who'll always give it to you straight. DeSiro takes as her subject a modern woman's search for romantic fulfillment, its asymmetries and its indignities, its charades and its compromises, showing how love can be, at one moment, tender as a kiss and, at the next, tender as a bruise. Amid the sleaze and setbacks and soured dreams, she harnesses her musical affinities to provide achingly lovely glimpses of the transcendent, the bedroom window-blind becoming "a grand staff / where the full moon floats like a perfect / whole note," honoring the heart's resilience and the courage required to plead guilty to "wanting love; wanting; love."
Here's the blurb I wrote for it:
This book is as wry as its tongue-in-cheek title, self-aware and scorchingly honest, like the big sister or best friend who'll always give it to you straight. DeSiro takes as her subject a modern woman's search for romantic fulfillment, its asymmetries and its indignities, its charades and its compromises, showing how love can be, at one moment, tender as a kiss and, at the next, tender as a bruise. Amid the sleaze and setbacks and soured dreams, she harnesses her musical affinities to provide achingly lovely glimpses of the transcendent, the bedroom window-blind becoming "a grand staff / where the full moon floats like a perfect / whole note," honoring the heart's resilience and the courage required to plead guilty to "wanting love; wanting; love."