Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.

I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

It seems particularly ironic that a church that at one stage, a long time ago, fought to redefine marriage should now be so opposed to these attempts to redefine marriage.

Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.