I don’t know how I can recommend Roland Barthes any more highly than to say that my own book is based on Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse—other than to say that I often loan A Lover’s Discourse to hot men, as a flirt.

Reading the book for the first time felt like a friend flicking me in the head over and over going, “Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.” Barthes breaks down the experience of being a lover into minute slices, unearthing the type of wriggly thoughts I had experienced but had never seen written about. The kind of thing like: “Are not excess and madness my truth, my strength?” And: “I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned”—huge for someone who has been single for stretches of time bordering on infinity, but who concurrently...