What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Raymond Carver

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She believes that Ed loved her no matter what Mel or the others think, demonstrating that gut feelings about love can be more powerful and accurate than words. Mel would visit the couple daily, and when he put his ear to the husband's mouth-hole, the latter told Mel he was upset because he could not see his wife through his eye-holes.

Afterward, the husband became depressed, but Mel clarifies that this wasn’t because he was traumatized over the accident: the man was upset because his full-body cast made it so he couldn’t “turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife. Nancy Berg and Naomi Sokoloff tack on a parenthetical in their 2018 book, What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (and What It Means to Americans). Although the four friends talk for a while about love, the fact that they never manage to define it suggests that language can’t adequately describe emotional, abstract subjects.

While there, James is perturbed by a young hippy-like couple dressed in denim who go on to ruin his fun and evening: they take the Packers' parking spot; James sees the young man cheating and confronts him but the man denies the allegation.

In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” two married couples spend an afternoon together drinking gin and debating the nature of love.What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is told using a first-person point of view, but the character that controls the majority of the dialogue and subsequently the discussion is not the narrator. The character's more liberal experiences and opinions on love help to situate the story around the 1970s or 80s.

At the fence, Nancy meets her neighbor Sam, a widower, who is spreading insecticide to kill slugs which are ruining his garden. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. The couples’ conversation about love is a failure, but once they fall silent, their beating hearts are all audible.This points to his belief that their love is clear and straightforward—that he understands what it is and how it works. Additionally, it seems that violence and love aren’t as neatly compartmentalized for Mel as he’d like to think: in addition to his frequent spats with Terri throughout the conversation, he shares fantasies of being a medieval knight who captures women and of murdering his ex-wife, Marjorie.

Authors have always sought to renegotiate the parameters of conversations that started long before them. He says he loves Terri, but he knows he loved his first wife, Marjorie, too, even though he hates her now. The husband was okay, and the wife was going to be okay, but the husband was depressed because he couldn’t see his wife through the eyeholes in his cast.

But she admits that she and Mel were scared when Ed was threatening them and that Mel had even made a will. As he reaches for her breasts, she hears water running in the sink and is reminded of the girl floating in the river. Once again, Mel has proved himself innocent and even idealistic and ignorant about the realities of the ‘heart’.