Tim Kreider has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker online, The Week, The Men’s Journal, and Nerve.com. His popular comic strip, The Pain—When Will It End?, ran in alternative weeklies and has been has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics. He is the author of two collections of essays, We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. He divides his time between New York City and the Chesapeake Bay area.
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays
by Tim Kreider
eBook
$12.99
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ISBN-13:
9781476739021
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Publication date: 02/06/2018
- Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 224
- Sales rank: 189,215
- File size: 3 MB
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New York Times essayist and author of We Learn Nothing, Tim Kreider trains his virtuoso writing and singular power of observation on his (often befuddling) relationships with women.
Psychologists have told him he’s a psychologist. Philosophers have told him he’s a philosopher. Religious groups have invited him to speak. He had a cult following as a cartoonist. But, above all else, Tim Kreider is an essayist—one whose deft prose, uncanny observations, dark humor, and emotional vulnerability have earned him deserved comparisons to David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and the late David Foster Wallace (who was himself a fan of Kreider’s humor).
In his new collection, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You, he focuses his unique perception and wit on his relationships with women—romantic, platonic, and the murky in-between. He talks about his difficulty finding lasting love, and seeks to understand his commitment issues by tracking down the John Hopkins psychologist who tested him for a groundbreaking study on attachment when he was a toddler. He talks about his valued female friendships, one of which landed him on a circus train bound for Mexico. He talks about his time teaching young women at an upstate New York college, and the profound lessons they wound up teaching him. And in a hugely popular essay that originally appeared in The New York Times, he talks about his nineteen-year-old cat, wondering if it’s the most enduring relationship he’ll ever have.
Each of these pieces is hilarious and profound, and collectively they further cement Kreider’s place among the best essayists working today.
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Publishers Weekly
01/08/2018Essayist and cartoonist Kreider (We Learn Nothing) returns with another incisive and cutting collection of essays, this time loosely focused on the women in his life. Over the course of the book, he recounts a trip with a close friend aboard a circus train bound for Mexico, a whirlwind affair with a sex worker, and the surreal experience of falling in love with a married friend in the weeks following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This collection is noteworthy not so much for the insights into dating or women, but rather for Kreider’s humane outlook coupled with his often-wry sense of humor: he has rules about which living things he can kill (fruit flies, yes; spiders, no) and makes the dry admission of being a “cat guy.” Kreider’s clever hand and philosophic—rather than solipsistic—viewpoint place him in a different realm than writers like David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace who share his affection for details, uncommon settings, and nuance. (Feb.)
author of Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
"Tim Kreider's voice is never anything less than honest, smart, and hilarious; in I Wrote This Book Because I Love You he is even more mordant and empathetic than ever before. What a sad and beautiful book."author of The Dinner Party and Other Stories - Joshua Ferris
"Tim Kreider's wonderfully frank, consistently funny essays reminded me at a time of spectacular doubt that there might still be a few men in America who are both weird and wise, equally friendly to cats and ex-girlfriends, and refreshingly willing to admit to flaws that come entirely free of vindictiveness and cruelty. In an age of widespread buffoonery, it's a pleasure and a relief to have Kreider restore a little faith."Lionel Shriver
Not only smart, but admission-against-interest honest—a winning combination, and rare."author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion - Meghan Daum
"Tim Kreider is one of my favorite living writers, no exaggeration...His wisdom is counterintuitive and therefore all the wiser; his humor is dark in ways that let light in where it's needed most. This isn't a book about one man's relationship to women as much as it's a chart of the collision course of human need in all its wrenching, perverse, gorgeous, hilarious forms. It's his best stuff yet."Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls - Richard Russo
"Tim Kreider may be the most subversive soul in America and his subversions—by turns public and intimate, political and cultural—are just what our weary, mixed-up nation needs."Judd Apatow
"Tim Kreider's writing is heartbreaking, brutal and hilarious—usually at the same time. He can do in a few pages what I need several hours of screen time and tens of millions to accomplish. And he does it better. Come to think of it, I'd rather not do a blurb. I am beginning to feel bad about myself."David Foster Wallace
Kreider rules.Booklist
"[Kreider's] essays are beautifully written, with just enough humor to balance his spikiness, and will please lovers of fine writing.”PublishersWeekly.com
We Learn Nothing articulated, for me, more human truths than any book in recent memory. When you’re done with it, it almost feels like finishing a textbook: you actually feel like you understand how things work a little better.Kirkus Reviews
2017-11-13A noted cartoonist and essayist returns with another collection of profoundly personal essays.A number of themes and motifs glide through the gleaming streams of Kreider's (We Learn Nothing, 2012, etc.) writing. He writes continually about his relationships with women, all of which have broken (though some amiably so), and he notes that he has never been married or even lived with a woman. We also hear about the cat he's had for nearly 20 years; the author wryly notes that this relationship has lasted the longest of his adult life. Throughout, Kreider, the creator of the popular comic strip "The Pain—When Will It End?," deploys an extremely self-deprecating tone, which comes across as appealing and humorous and, sometimes, laugh-out-loud funny. He identifies himself as an atheist, but he also says that belief is "softening" now. He also writes affectingly about time, observing that the past is really just a story we continually revise. Though most of the pieces—previously published in other forms—are brief, there are a couple of longer ones, including one about "attachment theory," a topic that increased in interest for him when he learned that as an infant he'd been involved in a key psychological study on the topic. His liberal political views are evident, particularly so in "Our War on Terror," an essay that gently interweaves his observations about current events with an account of another imploding relationship with a woman. Literary and cultural allusions pop up throughout the collection: Albee, Gilgamesh, Maslow, Freud, Montaigne, Descartes, and others. Kreider can also be informal/nontraditional in his language, and the pieces are piercingly, painfully reflective: for example, he discusses his college teaching experiences and how he dealt with his sexual attractions to his students.An artful example of how the deeply personal can also be the broadly general.