Reading "Lust" by Susan Minot

Oh my gosh, this is such an awesome piece of fiction. What Minot basically does is, in tons of little and extraordinarily vivid snapshots, chronicles the desperation and emptiness that one woman feels after carrying on countless lustful encounters with different guys. Throughout the story (if you can call it that, because it reads more like an essay), snippets of strict exposition give us an idea of what is going on internally while her "body" does its thing. The reason I use the word "body" is that she, early on in the text, describes herself in this way: "he got up again to close the door, then came back to me, a body waiting on the rug" (218). These portions of exposition are typically written in the second person. I thought it was interesting that the narrator could explicitly describe her sexual encounters with the pronoun "I," but then, when she started talking about the feeling of emptiness that comes with them, she had to switch it to "you." This is a subtle, but powerful technique. Another thing that I found interesting is that she referred to the guys she messes around with as "boys." Not men, not guys, but boys. This gives them a certain immaturity in a really subtle and implicit way. Awesome writing.