Couplets: A Love Story

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Millner . . . offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism’s demand for incessant labor.” Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think. Millner is brilliant at showing how early moments of lust can be existentially unmooring . . . Couplets is deft, delicate and unexpectedly fun. ”

This is both a surprisingly hot treatise on consent and, in the repetitions of you did, an understated, canny retooling of the recursive eruptions of yes from the mouth of Joyce’s Molly Bloom. It’s a sequence worth the price of admission.

Did you feel any tension in relaying a coming out story that mirrored aspects of your own experience as a queer writer?

And isn’t love itself a type of rhyme? And don’t gender and genre share one route? Maybe I really am a poet, needing as I do from these imperfect sets,

Right now, Millner is in between tours; it’s a brief moment of repose, and her demeanor is warm and open. After a couple glasses of wine, the conversation turns from poetry—the author discusses her upbringing in a small town in rural upstate New York, her academic experiences, and a certain inclination for overthinking. (At one point, she admits to having sent a multi-paragraph apology text to a friend for “being awkward” when she was handed a slice of birthday cake, to which the friend responded, “HAHAHA.”) 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? In this riveting debut, Maggie Millner makes the rhyming couplet—that supposedly staid, outmoded vehicle of 18th century moralism—an engine of radical metamorphosis and scorching sex. Couplets plunges us into desire so fierce it overwrites existence, exiling us from the lives we know. This is an endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.”

Did you know from the start that you wanted to achieve a hybrid form with this book?

Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.”

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 title of the book, Couplets , is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it.

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?

A dazzling, feather-light tour de force—witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real.’ Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or