Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Don’t call it a comeback: Susan Minot has been writing sex for years. The titular story of Minot’s Lust and Other Stories (1989), which followed her breakout debut, Monkeys (1986), recalls a woman’s early sexual encounters. Evening (1998), later adapted into a screenplay, features a dying woman’s memories of a brief love affair in her youth. Rapture, a 2014 novella, recounts an extramarital affair as recalled by the ex-lovers in the course of a single sex act.In Don’t Be a Stranger, her first novel in a decade (a short-story collection, Why I Don’t Write, appeared in 2020), Minot tells the story of a divorced mother’s involvement with an emotionally unavailable young man. Set in 2011, the book follows Ivy Cooper, a 52-year-old writer who has recently moved to New York with her son, Nicky, a third-grader. She embarks on an entanglement with Ansel Fleming, a musician in his mid-thirties who served a seven-year prison sentence for a minor drug offence.At first, the affair renders Ivy “a cliché of postcoital bliss”: after sex, “the reflection came, not for the first time, ‘Why does anyone do anything but this?’”. But it’s not long before she wants something more. Unable to swat her heart back down in the face of Ansel’s unapologetic non-commitment, his intermittent texts become a torture. “How easy it was sometimes, like hooking fish in a stocked pond,” Ivy admits, as she bikes to his apartment for an afternoon assignation.Although she writes sex well, the throughline of Minot’s oeuvre is less a play-by-play of what happens between bodies than between the ears. In addressing mid-life female desire, Don’t Be a Stranger has inevitably led to comparisons with Miranda July’s All Fours (2024), which also features an affair with a younger man. Ever quirky, July’s voice is more outrageous. Although at times tongue-in-cheek funny, Minot is ultimately most interested in her protagonists’ inner experience of the emotional dance of intimacy.She is also preoccupied with memory and time. Don’t Be a Stranger weaves in the back-story of Ivy’s divorce and maps the quotidian concerns of motherhood on to her thoughts about Ansel. After numerous unsuccessful attempts at breaking it off, a health crisis for Nicky snaps Ivy out of her obsession. “Having a child in distress delivered yet another new version of worry and of pain,” Ivy observes. “How could one bear it? One felt one could not, then in the morning one woke and one had.”A poet and a painter as well, Minot has long been admired for her minimalist prose and visual descriptions. The imagery is even more pared back in Don’t Be a Stranger, as if the years have stripped her prose of metaphor and whittled it down to its bare-bones essentials. The last section even flirts with abstraction by framing Ivy’s recovery in a series of rooms across the city — the Brown Room, Pink Room, Red Room, Grey Room and White Room — revealed to be a therapist’s office, yoga studio, movie theatre, 12-step meeting room and lecture hall.The literary landscape has thankfully evolved since the themes of Lust and Other Stories — the difficulties of establishing meaningful and lasting emotional and sexual connections between men and women — were dismissed as “corny” by a male critic. Minot’s protagonists have grown older, but in matters of the heart, no wiser. Just as the mistress’s friends in Rapture counsel against getting involved with a married man, Ivy’s friends challenge the wisdom of pursuing someone who makes no bones about being unavailable: “You’re licking honey from the razor blade,” warns one. But love and lust can blind us to logic, and for Ivy, the longing presents a welcome relief from grief and self-recrimination. No matter the age, Minot has said, “sometimes, it’s instructive to do something stupid”.Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot Knopf £24.14 320 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
