Entire genres of art would never exist if we humans learned to listen to one another; to communicate our needs and wants; to make the effort to see and understand others. I so wish to live in a world where a book like this is incomprehensible. (In my first draft I added a snarky “but it’s not up to me” here. But no: it is up to me. And you. If we don’t set the example, who will?)

This was a painful read on so many levels. Emotionally, of course: it’s raw, often brutally so, with themes of loneliness, insecurity, violence, trauma, and desperate need. Intellectually—the moments I was able to distance myself from the story, that is—because every one of the lives in the book was real, and suffering in ways that so many others have and still do. And literarily, because it took serious work to read: it’s narrated almost entirely in dialog, beautiful conversations that sound and feel genuine but whose cost is clarity. Just like in the real world, there are entire oceans beneath the surface of our conversations: shared understandings (and misunderstandings), shortcuts that mostly work but so often lead to ambiguity and to further misunderstandings. Jones’s dialog is superb, each voice unique, each sentence (and silence) communicating so much more than their component words. I felt like I was witnessing, not watching.

The need to connect with others is unquenchable but also overpowering: we can’t stop trying even if we know that we’ll never reach connection, which not everyone knows. We can come close: by talking, maybe by fucking, maybe for the very very fortunate through both. We can also use both to, despite our intentions, create distance, cause suffering to ourselves and others. You can probably guess which of those outcomes Jones chronicles. And if you’re a decent person you may wonder why you’d want to read this? And I don’t have a convincing answer for you but I still think you should.