That crazy thing called love: The Hypothetical Girl
by Elizabeth Cohen, Other Press, $11.36
Approaching someone you’re attracted to can make some people sweat compulsively. Others close up like a clam and become the creepy wierdo women talk about the next morning with their girlfriends, while some are too scared to even say hello.
And so we retreat behind the screen thinking it would make this dating thing easier. But the digital realm is just as complex as it is face to face.
In The Hypothetical Girl, Elizabeth Cohen brilliantly weaves a collection of mistaken attraction, vanity at its worse, stalking, loneliness, and secret fetishes. It is anything but those cheesy I met my wife/husband/partner/lover online fairytales (although there are some happy endings). It’s the stories that make us human in all our ugliness and beauty.
It’s a man obsessed over a woman who rejects him and finds relief in a simple word that even I wish I’d known before– “Limerence” (look it up).
It’s about “The Man Who Made Whirligigs” ditching a one-night stand at a truck stop for selfish reasons that make it hard for the reader not to side with.
It’s a woman getting breast cancer and discovering solace in something “she could not name”. It’s the “Opposite of Love.”
It’s learning you don’t send a free verse poem to strangers, thinking it’s a cute turn-on as one friend tells another in “Death By Free Verse”:
“Clear, short iambic pentameter poems with no more than two verses are okay before the first date, as are haiku, limericks, and tanka. No sonnets, villanelle or pantoums until at least three dates have gone by successfully. As for free verse love poems, save those for a one-year anniversary.”
It’s seeing yourself in Cohen’s lost characters searching for The One, True Love, and every other grand cliche we give that emotional connection we desperately seek from others, and being able to laugh about it, realizing that maybe what you need isn’t always in what you’re searching for.
What I liked most about Cohen’s stories is that these characters didn’t always get exactly what they want. Her writing will shock and surprise you with unpredictable endings. Very simple and very honest, The Hypothetical Girl is a quick read you won’t want to put down.