Seven stories told from both members of a couple

Robin Kirman studied philosophy at Yale before receiving her MFA in writing from Columbia, where she also taught for several years. Her curiosity about humanpsychology has led her to combine work in psychoanalysis with writing fiction. Her first novel, Bradstreet Gate, was published by Crown in 2015, and her television series The Love Wave is currently in development.

Kirman's new novel is The End of Getting Lost.

At Lit Hub Kirman tagged seven

novels that alternate between the voices of members in a couple, specifically where this is more than a device: where it’s an examination of one of the central concerns we lonely humans have—how much can we ever really know of another, or be known? How close to another living soul can we ever truly come?

One title on the list:

Sylvia Brownrigg, Pages for Her

Where Barnes begins to explore same-sex love between men, Pages For Her devotes itself to the romantic and formative relationship between two women. The novel is a follow-up to Brownrigg’s Pages for You, in which young Flannery falls in love with her older teacher, Anne—a relationship that opens up Flannery not just to sexual passion, but to other possibilities—including literary—within herself. 20 years later, where the next novel takes up the story, Flannery’s once-expansive character feels as if it’s shrunken. Though the novel includes the points of view of both women, Flannery is as much in dialogue with her younger, more passionate incarnation. Here, in contrast to those works where art and love stand in tension, in Pages For Her, as the name implies, love’s fire kindles a passion to create.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue