It Has Its Reasons

Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion, edited by Daniel Jones (Three Rivers, 400 pp., $14.95)

ONE of my week’s guilty pleasures is the “Modern Love” column appearing each Sunday in the New York Times “Styles” section. A first-person confession from a different writer each week, “Modern Love” offers two delights for the schadenfroh connoisseur: first, the unaffected egotism of the authors, who find their personal problems fascinating enough to merit exposure to the entire world; and second, genuinely atrocious writing. Just to give you an idea, one time a professor of creative writing (!) clued us in on just how interesting and open-minded she is with the line, “Some people might say I have a boundary problem.” One will look in vain for a more perfect specimen of vapid psychobabble than “boundary problem”: Having myself now used the phrase many times, I can attest that nothing stupefies an audience faster than, “You see, I think I may have a boundary problem.” The more gravely the phrase is uttered, the more satisfying the results.

SM

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Sarah M. Bramwell

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Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion, edited by Daniel Jones (Three Rivers, 400 pp., $14.95)

ONE of my week’s guilty pleasures is the “Modern Love” column appearing each Sunday in the New York Times “Styles” section. A first-person confession from a different writer each week, “Modern Love” offers two delights for the schadenfroh connoisseur: first, the unaffected egotism of the authors, who find their personal problems fascinating enough to merit exposure to the entire world; and second, genuinely atrocious writing. Just to give you an idea, one time a professor of creative writing (!) clued us in on just how interesting and open-minded she is with the line, “Some people might say I have a boundary problem.” One will look in vain for a more perfect specimen of vapid psychobabble than “boundary problem”: Having myself now used the phrase many times, I can attest that nothing stupefies an audience faster than, “You see, I think I may have a boundary problem.” The more gravely the phrase is uttered, the more satisfying the results.