Desire: A Memoir. By Jonathan Dollimore

Few books cover depression, loss, remorse, boredom, motorbikes, love, addiction, desire, disgust, and suicide, in such compelling, moving, disarming, and at times disjunctive ways, setting ‘significant experiences of things in tension with one another … all in the orbit of desire’ (p. 7). Rather than explicating and discriminating, though, this book works to imbricate and concatenate: ‘I think depression has been a sickness of desire inseparable from memory’ (p. 98). It may be the honest, not to say explicit, depiction of forms of sexual desire that grabs a reader’s attention. But, as Dollimore notes early on, ‘this book is also about other things, other desires’ (p. 1). These include the desire to be a writer, and thus the desire to write well about life, ideas, and writing, especially literature (and especially writers like Cavafy, Yeats, Shelley, Gunn, and Shakespeare, about all of whom Dollimore has intriguing things to say here)....