Couplets: A Love Story

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Well, every time I find a new script for my life or slot myself into an existing category, I feel some sense of disaffection or alienation from that category. Like, how do I invite some flexibility into the way I conceive of myself and my relationships and my identity? It’s a coming out book, but I don’t think the character at the end of the book is done, right? There’s no happily ever after, because I tried really hard to stay away from the suggestion that things fully resolve. I think if you’re someone who wants to think about sexuality and gender and where you fit along these spectrums – if you’re someone who’s excited by those questions – I don’t know that you necessarily arrive in some definitive place so much as you engage in a process of ongoing discovery. Do you think of writing about relationships as a form of catharsis, or is it important to you to keep that aspect out of your work?

Toward the very end of the book, the narrator declares that in verse, as opposed to in prose, there are “barely any characters at all.” What do you think about the differences between character as it can be constructed in prose versus poetry? Maggie Millner’s Couplets. . . grapples confidently and tenderly with the uneasy parts of being alive and in love.” For Millner, this question only led to more questions, which spring unbidden to the mind of her protagonist—a woman living in Brooklyn in her late-20s, dating a man toward whom she feels a sense of profound, if filial, affection. Thus far, she’s been able to suppress her desire to experiment with women, ignoring the increasingly homoerotic fantasies that surface in her dreams—at least, until an accidental meet-cute leads her to embark on an all-consuming affair. Copulative pleasures abound in this spectacular debut . . . Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement.” Millner is brilliant at showing how early moments of lust can be existentially unmooring . . . Couplets is deft, delicate and unexpectedly fun. ”Millner’s story-in-verse—trying to classify this wonderfully amorphous book about the fluidity of desire is entirely beside the point—centers on a woman who falls in love with another woman for the first time, a relationship that upends her ideas of intimacy and herself.” In her luminous, electric debut, Millner creates an original form to express the headlong revelations, obsessions, and erotic geometry of love. Couplets is propulsive, poignant, and terrific at showing the way carnality is tethered to vulnerability.” The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists?

I feel similarly vexed about relationship structures. I do feel there is something amazing and irreplicable about the experience of being in a couple. And I don’t think that experience is only a cultural production—there’s something genuinely special that can happen between two individuals. Moments of intimacy with one other person have been the most transformative, spiritual moments of my life. The speaker of Couplets is magnetized toward those experiences. They’re real, they’re important, and they’re beautiful—they’re what it’s all about. But through those experiences, she finds herself unwittingly signed up for a certain kind of partnership—caught in a default she didn’t necessarily choose. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real. I want a time machine so I can give this book to my Eugene Onegin-obsessed teenage self!” I think the issue is not with the structure of the couple, but with the telos of any relationship being eternity—the idea that the couple is a form you only step into and never out of. There is something exalted about the experience that two individuals can have with each other. Suddenly, you’re not really an individual, which is the profundity that you experience in the presence of an other. I feel very attached to that. But this book is an experiment in thinking through the question, What if staying together wasn’t the tacit objective of every relationship? In Poetic Closure , Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that the couplet is a unit that enacts closure. Every two lines, there’s resolution. And so there’s a propulsive momentum to the form, but it also pretends to arrive at closure over, and over, and over again. There’s an assumption that the couple is a closed container, but the couplet unravels that assumption through repetition. As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her. The writing is deftly poetic, the explorations of literary narratives are seamlessly woven into the novel’s story, and the story itself is subtly layered with thoughts on the freedom to make choices in our lives (and more) and engagingly paced. Kudos to Millner for this impressive debut.

Millner . . . offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism’s demand for incessant labor.”