THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT

Hepola’s second memoir is a story of three love affairs, all of them doomed.

The author, who entranced readers with her candor in Blackout (2015), a memoir of her years of alcoholism, brings the same unsparing honesty to her search for true love. She explains that in her 20s, she chose a big, unconventional life: adventure, a career, and the things unavailable to her mother, whose “small radius” existence Hepola semi-pitied, always assuming this path “would double back at some point and deliver” her to a husband and a child. Instead, at 45, in a therapist’s office, chronically single, she looks back at the three loves that “haunted” her: “a detective in New Orleans, a married man, a younger man,” each of whom “roamed just beyond her fingertips.” The book unfolds in three parts, one per man. First comes the married man, a friend turned something more, who proves surprisingly the steadiest and most emotionally present of the three until it becomes clear that he and his wife define the flexibility in their marriage differently. Part two belongs to the younger man, 29 to Hepola’s 44, met on Tinder; once she gets past her disbelief that he wants her, she falls hard for his movie-star looks and his life on a locomotive-factory line, so unlike her own. Part three revisits the great love of her 20s, the detective, who dumped her unceremoniously and resurfaces decades later. She still finds him magnetic, though her sobriety now casts his drinking in a stark light. It’s he who hands her the book’s title, in a line that becomes its thesis: Desire feeds only on distance. Fans of Blackout will recognize the same fearless honesty and propulsive readability. The tone is so casual, so conversational, that it’s easy to miss just how good a writer Hepola is: The prose is precise even when it’s taking risks, unexpected turns of phrase landing with the ease of a friend talking you through her worst nights.

A brilliant autopsy of loves lost.