Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?

Darian Leader's first book collects linked essays that read the ordinary frustrations of love through a Lacanian account of desire. Small puzzles, a letter written but never posted, or the partner chosen because she is unlike the mother and then pressed to behave exactly like her, become occasions for a structural claim: desire is never aimed at the flesh and blood companion in the room but at something standing behind them. Leader works from nineteenth century fiction, Austen and the Brontes among others, rather than case material, keeping the argument close to how longing actually reads.

The distinction it holds to is between the masculine and feminine positions in love, and the different forms of solitude each carries. For the clinician the value is in the ear it trains: a way of hearing how a patient's complaint about a partner points past that partner, and why a couple's most trivial questions are rarely trivial. Faber published it in 1996.