Desire: A Reckoning is a remarkable contemporary memoir. Its author, Jessie Cole, is unafraid to be vulnerable – in her life and her writing. This, her fourth book (and second memoir) is an extraordinary exploration of both physical and emotional desire, and the fraught limits of passion, need and want. Cole’s romantic desires are set against deep family tragedy: the suicide of her sister, and then, some years later, the suicide of her father.
Against layers of thinking about love, desire, bodies and ecological disaster, Desire traces a love affair, a long-distance relationship between Cole and an unnamed, older lover.
