My favorite books about enjoying obsessive love without a therapy bill

I loved how The Use of Photography provides a voyeuristic thrill of pre-coitus images, with the co-authors’ garments creating the mood, a story in strewn tights, knocked over leather boots. These photos alternate with deadpan observations of a doomed love affair.

The affair takes place as Ernaux, in middle age, undergoes invasive cancer treatments. The passion between the couple is girded by the indignities of chemo. Marc Marie writes, “For months we live together as a threesome, death, A., and me.”

I’ve never read a book in which lust cuts through deadpan photography analysis. It’s like the co-authors are balancing on a seesaw of future loss.

Startling, quick-witted attention to story pervades this collection, but I’m especially entranced with “Bog Girl: A Romance.”

Tell me another story in which a young man named Cillian falls in love with a girl dug out from peat, a teen who is two thousand years old. Karen Russell makes me root for this love affair and believe completely that Cillian rises “with the Bog Girl in his arms, nuzzling her blue neck.”

The haunting lingers as I read the other compelling stories, too, including a story in which a mother makes a pact with the devil.

This memoir is written to the man Terese Marie Mailhot has an affair with, which began “in a small booth at Village Inn.”

He was her fiction teacher, a potent taboo, and she describes his shaking hands and smoke-encrusted hoodie. The book pulses with her desire for him and her resistance, knowing he was ruining her. I found the book addictive.

Mailhot describes her upbringing as a member of the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. I learned how she manifests stories to save herself. She is diagnosed with bipolar II disorder and PTSD, leading to hospitalization. Her crafting of this memoir is a love story, ultimately, to her resilience. 

The obsession of Isabel, or Isa, revolves at first around possessions in her uncle’s house.

She and her brothers moved there during World War II, but when the story begins, only Isa is left. The objects take on the weight of loss after her mother’s death, and Isa fears the caretaker is stealing from her. When Eva, the girlfriend of Isa’s brother arrives, she disrupts Isa’s static isolation. Objects disappear—or do they? And the pull between Isa and Eva becomes electric.  

Yael van der Wouden subtly layers red herrings and shifts my understanding of Isa and her family, ultimately revealing that the house, so carefully maintained, has a dark history rooted in the war. Isa’s paranoia and lust build to a devastating betrayal.

I have a weakness for rock biographies and oral histories, so this leapt to the list because of Darby Crash’s dangerous and self-debased fans.

At Crash’s experimental high school in southern California, the pedagogy mixed Scientology and est with algebra and social studies, creating a template for Crash when he became an early punk. Crash had violent female groupies, though he was queer, and they—and other fans—would extinguish lit cigarettes on their wrists to show their devotion.

The cast of characters in the book are vibrant and debased, just teenagers and young adults when they slam-danced and slammed drugs in squalid clubs.