No one had ever told what the true cost, the real work of love is, because men and women have never been equals.Instead of love stories, we have always had romances, quests in which one is the hunter, the other the hunted.

Now that men and women can be partners in making love—in actually creating the grounds for it, as well as in expressing it— we need a new love poetry, we need new descriptions of how love is made: all the world’s love poetry has only introduced us to the work love requires.

D. H. Lawrence broke the new ground with his novels and with his poems, and a few intrepid writers—and hordes of feckless memoirists—have followed into the intimidating abyss where emotions have their authority, where desire creates its own laws, and exacts its own payments—for modern freedom as much as for love's belongings.

In this novel—which is a really long prose poem—I am trying to give an account of what love's become in the era of self-reliance.