Melissa Broder

Bottoming out after a dramatic breakup, doctoral student Lucy accepts her sister's invitation to dog-sit at her home on Venice Beach for the summer, where she meets an eerily attractive swimmer whose Sirenic identity transforms her understanding of what real love looks like.

a novel

The pisces

Fiona

I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this is how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation or longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated—something natural—holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured.

Is that what it meant to love yourself? To be repellent?

You could buy enlightenment from a range of Eastern texts: the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. You could buy healing in a white jasmine pillar candle or protection in a black votive. Capitalist magic.

“I think the place for you to start, the question that you might want to ask yourself, isn't so much what is love," she said. "But is it really love I'm looking for?"

The pisces quotes

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