Queer studies owes its status as an academic discipline in large part to the literary criticism and theoretical writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (including, most famously,
Epistemology of the Closet). In
A Dialogue on Love, she applies her skills to the analysis of a far more personal text: herself. This stunningly intimate memoir is an exploration of Sedgwick's journey through therapy for depression, beginning 18 months after a diagnosis of breast cancer. She places her therapist's notes in dialogue with her own words, which take the 17-century Japanese form of
haibun, traditionally reserved for travel narratives; a description of another work structured in this way applies equally to her own writing: "Spangled with haiku is more what it feels like, [the] very sentences fraying
into implosions
of starlike density or
radiance, then out
into a prose that's never quite not the poetry." A Dialogue on Love is an engaging, brilliantly constructed portrait of the unique intimacy between therapist and patient, exploring the intricate relationships between childhood precocity, positioning within the family, fantasy, sex, the body, depression, and attitudes toward death. Through these issues, Sedgwick comes to a highly personal, yet expansive, definition of sexuality inclusive of fantasy, autoeroticism, and cultural intimacy. --Julia Steinmetz
