Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love

Drawing on contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cognitive neuroscience, as well as his own personal experience and such famed and diverse writers on love as Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust, Adrienne Rich, and Raymond Carver, Clancy Martin--himself divorced twice and married three times--explores how love, truthfulness, and deception work together in contemporary life and society. He concludes that learning how to love and loving well inevitably requires lying and further argues that the best love relationships draw us slowly and with difficulty toward honesty and trust. Love and Lies is a relentlessly honest book about the difficulty of love, which is certain to both provoke and entertain.