Review - Love in the Time of Contagion by Laura Kipnis

Title: Love in the Time of Contagion*

Author: Laura Kipnis

Rating: 3.25 stars / 5 stars

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Favorite Quote: “Someone I know was infected by his ex during breakup sex - he claims not to blam her, though I suspect I would. (I’m a blamer.) Now they’re sharing the same RNA molecules for life, which will live on inside his cells until his dying day. As intimate as things get short of cannibalism.” Kipnis, Laura. Love in the Time of Contagion. E-book ed., Pantheon Books, 2022.

Review: Thank you to the publisher, Pantheon, and the Edelweiss platform for the free e-ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.

Love in the Time of Contagion, as the title aptly suggests, explores interpersonal relationships during Covid. Ranging from Kipnis’s own experiences, to her friend and colleague’s marriage ending, to a college student’s continued sexual experimentation even during quarantine, this book explores the myriad of ways in which Covid-19 strengthened, ruined, and changed our relationships to each other and our own selves, especially at the beginning as the world changed rapidly.

Kipnis is clearly a talented writer whose mastery of the English language manages to weave narratives of broad social upheaval into microsmic language of disease and its particles.

The book also engages in an interesting dialogue of the different types of relationships that existed at the beginning of Covid and how those types of relationships often mirrored the tumult of the political landscape as well as the medical landscape.

My main criticism of this book is that Kipnis, who shows a great deal of insight and thoughtfulness throughout much of the book, tends to lean into the crass and the over-general when exploring issues of sexual assault, harassment, and exploitation in the second chapter, “Vile Bodies: Heterosexuality and Its Discontents.” I had high hopes for this chapter - with a quote near the beginning of the chapter that seemed to point towards the complexities of intimacy and partner violence in the modern era, “My point is that personal life isn’t just personal. For any of us. We’re porous beings, infected by history no less than by viruses, by those we hate no less than those we love.” Kipnis, Laura. Love in the Time of Contagion. E-book ed., Pantheon Books, 2022. But then, as it went on, this chapter seemed to falter before ultimately falling flat. In going through my notes and highlights for this review, I found the note “NOT THE BEST TAKE” in a paragraph that ends with the reflection “These are, as mentioned, different times.” Whether intended or not, and to Kipnis’s benefit, I do believe not, this chapter seemed to teeter on the edge of the suggestion that our era was hyper moralistic and that behaviors not now considered acceptable are thought of as such, not because of the inherent problems associated with those behaviors, but more because of the implications our era has ascribed to them.

About that Quote: Kipnis is a talented writer who harnesses her mastery of metaphor to describe the unsettling and life altering experience of disease on the body - and ties that experience to that of a relationship (this one having ended). In that way, this quote serves as a microcosm for the book as a whole.

TW for this book: Covid, discussions of SA, substance use

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